Cobain inspires Last Days
2005-05-13 13:17
Cannes - The 58th Cannes film festival eases into its third day on Friday with Gus Van Sant's Last Days, a fictional account of the tragic end of a Kurt Cobain-like figure.
Last Days, which screened for the press late on Thursday ahead of a Friday premiere, is the latest loosely woven drama from Van Sant, who nabbed Cannes's coveted Palme d'Or prize in 2003 for Elephant, which was loosely based on the US school massacre at Columbine High School.
Van Sant picks up the similar themes here - death, youth and isolation - using a challenging technique that largely divorces the film from conventions such as plot, character development and dialogue.
The Cobain figure, known here as Blake, wanders through the woods around his rambling run-down castle, mutters to himself in a drug-induced stupor, tries on women's clothes and plays around with the shotgun that will later kill him.
Band members and other freeloaders crash at the house and largely ignore his impending flare-out because they are high themselves, all the while entertaining a parade of freakish door-to-door salesmen.
Eleven years after Cobain shot himself while on heroin, the image of the blonde-dyed actor Michael Pitt ("The Dreamers") picking up a guitar will be enough to send a shiver down the spines of fans due to his remarkable resemblance to the late Nirvana frontman.
Common link to tragedy
Van Sant said he was trying to explore the ironic loneliness of fame and its bizarrely common link to tragedy.
"With Kurt Cobain, nobody really knew where he was the last couple of days (of his life), and what was going on," Van Sant said in the production notes.
"The inspiration for Last Days was not so much the immediate event, but the intense fascination with his last days from seemingly the entire world. Somebody was in trouble and nobody could help them, and where were they and what were their last moments?"
Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore helped arrange the music for the film - some of which was written and performed by Pitt - while his wife and bandmate Kim Gordon plays a record company executive who tries to reach out to Blake, calling him a "rock'n'roll cliche".
Last Days is one of 21 films competing for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, which has drawn a remarkable set of heavyweight contenders this year including Wim Wenders, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier.
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan will also enter the competition Friday with another hard look at fame with Where the Truth Lies starring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth.