Gus Van Sant, "Last Days"

It's less that, as my friend David said, Van Sant has abandoned "bourgeois framing" than that he's returned to the wandering, loping style he used to great effect in "Mala Noche" and "My Own Private Idaho." A number of directors are challenging their viewers with super long shots, held almost beyond endurance, these days. Tsai Ming-liang in "Goodbye, Dragon Inn"; Abbas Kiarostami in "Five Dedicated to Ozu"; now Van Sant. It's as though we're witnessing a haunting by the ghost of Antonioni (he's not dead, but he might as well be).

From the very beginning of "Last Days," which was filmed in the woods of New York state, the loping, aimless, muttering figure at the center of the story is adrift, and I worried that the big stone house he prowls and flees and hunts through would drag him to the bottom of his merciless sea.

What is his face to us? A beautiful blank, less expressive of his existential exhaustion than his costume shape-shifting. The music he makes as we watch through a window tells the tale far better than any line he ever speaks or could speak.