I missed out on grunge’s guitar-spat sludge of teennui; a religious upbringing will do that to you. But having been accompanied to Last Days by a +1 who defers heart-in-hand to the gospel of Kobain, I imagine that might have been for the best. Because sorry to break it to ya kids, but no juiced-up it-was-Courtney-in-the-greenhouse-with-the-shotgun redeyeing here.

Settling for an endpoint that’s essentially a foregone conclusion, Last Days doesn’t so much reanimate historical incident as strangle it into liminal daydream; it turns the facts loose like origami cranes, letting them wander in tensile abstraction. Of course, giddily scrawling over media portraiture may be the order of the day, but every step still scrapes the ghost of mimesis: freely juxtaposing the mythical and banal, van Sant locks the two in a kind of playful Chinese-fingertrap dialogue. As such, his exhumed corpse of a lead barks impenetrability while slowly finding himself being crushed by the everyday.

With the completion of his ‘death trilogy,’ van Sant’s artistic butterflying has been dismissed as a prolonged crush on Hungarian powerhouse Bela Tarr. But even the most offhanded comparison of Elephant and Last Days (can’t speak for Gerry) is staggering: gone, for one, are the full-bodied tracking shots, having been replaced by a camera that stutters and drawls in time to its protag’s thought process. Meanwhile, Airbush High is gapped in favour of a decadent ruin that recalls the Birk-by-way-of-Wallis Kobain painting. Some may miss the more guided exegesis of past, but this is first and foremost an experience of solipsism, a portrait that crumbles the more it’s touched up. Here, van Sant stares into the sun, and somehow grasps at man’s total non-essence.—David Levinson

» Gus van Sant | USA | 2005