Mala Noche.

"No se puede vivir sin mar." (No one can live without love). - M. Lowry
Epigraph for Mala Noche or If You Coger With the Bull You Get the Horn (original novella)

In an interview on the Criterion dvd of Mala Noche, Gus Van Sant says he used much of the original Walt Curtis prose as voice over because it was a way to preserve the poetry of Mala Noche the source material. The raw, in your face style of the novella. The decision enshrined the voice of the writer whose work inspired Van Sant to create his first Portland feature.

Mala Noche the movie started Van Sant's career down the path toward becoming America's premier portrayer of alternative lifestyles. One of America's strongest filmmakers. Which is to ask the question, does the voice of Curtis crowd the vision of Van Sant? The novella itself is simple, gorgeous, and violently emotional. It's a boozy daydream diary of unrequited love. The fragments of voice littered across the film take full shape in the novella. The passionate intensity of the source isn't completely transferred to the screen, but its beefy foundation inspires a visually-specific Van Sant to drape visual poems across its bones.

This visual poetry, intelligent in chiaroscuro, makes the film emotionally vibrant. Van Sant's vision replaces and attempts to recreate Curtis's voice. The protruding portion of Van Sant demonstrates a compassion and curiosity still present in the filmmaker's work. Van Sant understands his characters. Mala Noche, a beautiful film, represents an underdeveloped understanding at how to express his characters cinematically.

The fluidity of feeling in Mala Noche is more efficient and remarkable than its cinematic grammar. The feeling > the form. Though the film searches for solutions.

In narrative terms, the film has a murder, which the novella does not. Why did Van Sant kill Pepper? I wonder if it was simply to have that third-act punctuation, or if he thought it heightened the racial message. I fear the former was the reason. The gun scene, like the earlier sex scene, is told through a montage of close-ups and medium shots, characters moving through light and shadow. The technique is transparent in purpose: it's slightly riveting. But the characters suffer slightly from this degree of manipulation, and it hinders them from finding full expression, compared for example to the fully believable, followable, and sympathetic murder in Van Sant's recent Paranoid Park.

Even in this early film it's clear that Van Sant is in pursuit of desperate questions, deeper meanings, and wants from cinema all that he asks. In Mala Noche, as always, Van Sant investigates cinematic form. He experiments with time lapse photography, point of view, voice over; he edits, composes a song, produces, and casts. This is the film in which Van Sant mixes his blood with cinema. Ultimately it has in common with Detour an overall elevation by powers not measurable, an intense and palpable interest in the fate of its characters that is the single most overwhelming component of the film. Mala Noche reminds us of the characters at the heart of Van Sant's films, his investment in them, and his investment in cinema. It's a brilliant start for a filmmaker, and Van Sant's brilliance continues to grow.