Seattle. Mike and Scott are male prostitutes, earning money by having sex with men. But while Mike does it out of pure necessity, since he is homeless, Scott just does it to anger his rich father, the mayor. Mike often suffers from narcoleptic attacks, which can startle some of his clients. A man, Hans, drops Mike and Scott off at Portland, where they meet their "mentor", Bob, who leads a gang of male prostitutes in an abandoned building. Mike and Scott set on a journey to Idaho to find Mike's lost mother. Mike also falls in love with Scott. Mike's father tells him that he is an illegitimate child, and that his mother killed Mike's real father. Mike and Scott travel to Rome to find her, but she has moved out and nobody knows where she went. Scott inherits his late father's wealth and breaks every contact with Mike, Bob and the gang. Mike has another narcoleptic attack and falls on the road.
Regarded as one of the most notable examples of modern gay cinema, this critically recognized independent film builds a syncretism of Shakespeare's play "Henry IV" (Scott is Prince Hal while Bob is Falstaff) and themes of male prostitutes and a protagonist in search for his parent: while this sounds like a disparate blend of the three, "My Own Private Idaho" is a surprisingly suggestive, aesthetic and emotional film that pays off later on. The director Gus Van Sant approaches the film's tricky subject with remarkable good taste, expressing his sense for the movie language: when a client gives a fellatio to Mike, not much is shown, but the latter' satisfaction is symbolically depicted in the daft image of a barn falling from the sky, crashing and dissolving on the road below.
In another sequence, Van Sant depicted a threesome between Hans, Mike and Scott in a dozen short scenes in which all of them are standing motionless, almost as they pretend to be "still frames", while the viewers are only given hints what they were doing (Hans touching a butt; Hans sucking a finger; Scott over Hans). The visual style is also demonstrated in one famous sequence of Scott and Mike "coming to life" as posters on magazines in a store, talking with each other, which was later copied in several films. "Idaho" features one of the rare movie roles of the early deceased actor River Phoenix, and gives it one of his best performances, depicting his character Mike as a person who stumbles across the entire film in search for love, but never manages to find it: neither his parent, nor Scott are willing to love him, making him a tragic, likeable figure. Van Sant wants to encompass as large of a spectrum of human states as possible in the film: from poverty to richness (Scott); from compassion to cold indifference; from friendship to betrayal; from humanity to inhumanity. In doing so, Van Sant crafted an unusual, very astringent and meditative film, but a one which stays in the viewers' memories for a long time. As Van Sant went mainstream in later films, he became more accessible to the audience, but lost a part of his magic in the process.
Grade:+++
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