It meanders, its characters mumble, it is obliquely based on real events surrounding the death of Kurt Cobain. Add to that, Gus Van Sant’s (editor, writer and director) improvisational style and preference for actors who’ve never acted before. Stories and situations appear in his films at random, often through the impromptu collaboration of those involved, directly or indirectly. The end result is something far from haphazard or lazy.
Last Days is the final installment of a trilogy inspired from real-life stories that have appeared in the media. Toted the “Death Trilogy,” Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and the aforementioned explore isolation: physical, social and mental, respectively. Zooming far enough out, the death theme reflects on a shattering or break up of reality, where the terms are redefined in new ways.
Emphasizing everyday insignificance, Van Sant utilizes a technique that shifts away from the spectacle. This allows the viewer self-reflexivity and open interpretation. There is no music video glam of the rock star rocking out or destroying instruments, no explicit drug use, no explosive intrusions from Courtney Love (thankfully), no band members, no gun blast, no blood, no close-ups of Cobain post-mort. Most of what happens occurs at the edges of shots, and otherwise outside of direct perception.
Language is muted and twisted, and at times, almost unrecognizable. However, it is highly stylized and important in the film. Almost obsessively so. Language is about connection. It’s how we relate. In the film, frustrated language combined with non-linearity and visual poetry create a perception about the necessity of human relation, or, the inability to separate this from what it means to be human and to exist in this world. Isolation here appears intensified, the fall-out of modern industrialization and an unsustainable market economy. Themes not unlike those of Thoreau’s Walden.
Gus van Sant’s filmmaking has made an important contribution to this era. He creates an inversion where the specific appeals to the universal, but is not subsumed by it. Emphasizing a relative insignificance, so to speak, people, actions and events maintain their specific qualities. As the allegorical Cobain edges closer towards death, his actions can be thought of as a movement and a desire for something more primal, more basic, more beautifully simplistic than the rock and roll cliché he became.
