Kansas is a stunt man working on a western movie directed by Samuel Fuller, filmed somewhere in a village in Peru. A man dies during a stunt. After the end of filming, Kansas stays in Peru and starts a relationship with a local woman, Maria. He meets several other Americans in pubs, and once goes to a brothel. Maria becomes more demanding and wants expensive gifts. Kansas' friend has a goldmine in his possession, but the idea to dig for gold is abandoned since its mining is too remote and too expensive. The locals starts imitating the filming, forcing Kansas to star in their game, but they demand real violence. Kansas is wounded and falls on the ground, but then stands up again.
"The Last Movie" demonstrates how the experimental disjointed anti-narration, adopted in the 60s during the counterculture movement and introduced by Godard and others, seems terribly dated today. It wanted to go against the mainstream, to be "art in spite", to be modern, yet just feels confusing, chaotic and hard to follow. It also takes the viewers out of the film and disrupts their engagement: in one scene, for instance, Kansas falls wounded on the ground, but then just looks into the camera and stands up, breaking any illusion of potential suspense. Following his success with "Easy Rider", Dennis Hopper directed this peculiar film without a plot, which has some interesting moments: for instance, the title "A Dennis Hopper Film" appears only some 10 minutes into the film, while the title "The Last Movie" appears even 10 minutes later after that. In another amusing meta-film moment, Kansas and Maria are driving in a car, while all of a sudden a black screen appears for a second with the title saying "Scene missing". More of such refreshing interventions would have been welcomed, since a fair share of the film's point seems lost. There are great shot compositions in "The Last Movie", though they are, for the aforementioned reasons, "detached" from the storyline. Hopper's unusual worldview is presented through a few quirky ideas (Kansas and Maria are naked under the waterfall, having sex, while a priest accidentally walks kids for a sight-seeing tour of nature above, and thus rushes the kids to move on before they can look down), incorporating themes of an outsider lost in an isolated place, a one who can never find closure, whereas he also adds a sly critique of Hollywood in the best subplot, the one where locals were so fascinated by the film crew making a western film, that they themselves spontaneously start to imitate them, even using a fake "camera" and" microphone" made out of sticks (!), but want to use real violence for their filming game, which hints at the negative effects of violence shown on film.
Grade:++
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