Keanu Reeves is expressive like a log. That is only too evident when watching any of his movies, including Gus van Sant's exploration of the life of boy prostitutes, My own private Idaho. Teen idol River Phoenix is slightly better, but not much. Luckily, this film is not about believable on-sceen appearances of the actors. The acting creates an effect of alienation (of course, Udo Kier has to act perform a little song in heavy German accent!), and so does the dialogue, partly performed in Shakespearian English (segments of the dialogue are from Henry IV). Sometimes these verfremdungseffekts work, and sometimes they don't. It's an uneven film, heavily marked by its time. (Why do I say this? Will I say it in twenty years?) But most of the small little experiments contribute to what becomes an offbeat, quite beautiful meditation on drifters. And yes - the "drifter" is romantizised to a sometimes ridiculous extent ("The road will never end", duh). It's always like that. But the interesting thing is that van Sant brings some unusual themes into the movies. The bromance, here, is explicitly homoerotic.
As a mood film, this is not bad. As a story about unrequited (?) love, it works too.
Clearly, this is a very influential movie. One sees traces of it in lots of contemporary indie movies.
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