Product Description

With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant's debut feature Mala Noche heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant's hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day-shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating time capsule from a time and place that continues to haunt its director's work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47162 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2007-10-09
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 78 minutes

Amazon.com
The first thing that strikes you about Mala Noche is the raw, beautiful cinematography--a high-contrast black-and-white that captures the gutters of Portland, OR, like the setting of a long-lost film noir. Next, you'll be struck that the narrator, a convenience clerk named Walt (Tim Streeter), rhapsodizes about his love for a young Mexican hustler named Johnny (Doug Cooeyate) without guilt or fear--perhaps reflecting the rare occasion of a movie by an openly gay filmmaker (Gus Van Sant, making his feature film debut) based on an openly gay autobiographical story (by Portland poet Walt Curtis). Though the movie doesn't have much of a plot--basically, Walt alternately tries to woo Johnny and his friend Roberto Pepper (Ray Monge), gaining little more than a suspicious, combative friendship and some fervid but isolated sex--but the rough but engaging flavor of the storytelling gives the movie momentum and a rich charm. The Criterion edition features two splendid extras: First, a low-key, unpretentious interview with Van Sant (who notes that the movie had the spontaneous and low-tech spirit of the Dogme 95 movement, though made several years earlier); and a ramshackle, pugnacious documentary by Portland-born animator Bill Plympton (I Married a Strange Person!) about Walt Curtis, who proclaims himself a "jerk-off poet therapist." If there is a Portland aesthetic, this compilation captures it. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

Unrequited gay love on the rainy streets of Portland
This was director Gus Van Sant's first official feature film and it remains one of my favorites. While the budget may have been low all of the directors trademarks were already on display, the non-judgemental approach to marginal lives, the gritty yet sensual visual style, the understated approach to narrative and the humor. Tim Streeter (who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Keanu Reeves) is Walt, a twenty-something slacker who works in a Portland skid row liquor store but who's real passion are the two illegal Mexican immigrant boys Johnny and Roberto "Pepper" who he strikes up an uneasy friendship with. While (to my eyes) the hunky, muscular Pepper (played by Ray Monge) is the more attractive of the two, it's scrawny little Johnny that Walt falls hardest for. When asked by a female friend how old Johnny is Walt can only smile and say "We'll, he says he's 18 but..." . In fact, Johnny doesn't look much older than 17 or so which is probably the element of the film that will pose a problem for some viewers.

The movie is based on an autobiographical chapbook by Portland poet Walt Curtis published in the 1970's and later reprinted in the 1990's along with photos and commentary by Gus Van Sant. I was surprised in reading the book that the film follows the original extremely faithfully...the main change appeared to be making the main protaganist younger and more conventionally handsome which changes the feel of the relationships somewhat.

Visually, the film is wonderful to look at...grubby and bathed in darkness. The black and white cinematography is sensitve to contrasts, between say the rainy, chilly exteriors and the dry, warm low-rent interiors or Walt's luminously white skin and the warmer toned complexions of his latino friends. In one extended, hushed sequence where Walt brings Pepper back to his apartment to stay the night the film actually reminded me a bit of David Lynch's Eraserhead with it's super low-key spot lighting and industrial sound effects. Other scenes like the back road car outing have all the looseness and airiness of early Godard. Always, the visual style has an off-hand, non-forced naturalism to it.

Stubbled, dreamy Walt is a prototypical Van Sant hero and along with Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho and Michael Pitt in Last Days, one of his gentlest creations. Other Van Sant films such as Psycho, Elephant, To Die For and Drugstore Cowboy feature more aggressive and violent characters which is perhaps partly why I find them a little less endearing.

There were other fine gay themed films from the 1980's...Maurice, Law of Desire, Dona Herlinda and Her Son but if I had to pick my favorite from that decade it'd be Mala Noche. Watching it again, it seems (like Drugstore Cowboy from 1989) very, very unlike other films from the 80's and more like a leftover from the late 70's. For me at least, this is a good thing.

Since I had lost hope that Mala Noche was every going to be released on DVD in the U.S. I splurged and bought a French import from the Amazon.fr website. Judging from that transfer, the film looks and sounds just great for it's age (and budget). The Criterion Collection disc should look at least as good as the MK2 disc.

art house release from 1985 too long unavailable
Mala noche is a 'bad night.' Skid Row in Portland is full of bad nights for the central character, a clerk in a pocket packet store. Sweaty, sexy Mexican kids come to the store for booze and cigarettes. One in particular throws him over into a sea of lust and unrequited love.

Who is a 'bad knight' and who is a knight in shining armor is never really resolved. The clerk tries to teach the Mexican day laborer to drive, but maybe he just wants to get away on the road in the Dodge Dart, icon of all things PNW.

Gus Van Sant produced this in 1985, the same year he produced the music for his William S. Burroughs CD Elvis Of Letters. The 'sensual despair' that haunts nearly every Van Sant film was forged in these Portland days of the Director.

I saw this film just once at a film festival in Seattle when it first came out, and I have ached to see it again, if for no other reason than to reflect on it in light of the subsequent druggie Road pictures [Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho] and the more recent 'fictu-mentaries' [Elephant and Last Days].

Hats off to the Criterian volk for releasing this film. Not all may like it; some will find it brief and coarse, and yet those qualities are what so powerfully animates the film.

FINALLY
When I was 14 I saw 'Drugstore Cowboy' for the first time and it made me look at film and life in a different light. I fell in love with Gus Van Sant's unjudgemental view of life and his affection for fringe people and vowed to see all of his films. I recently saw a bootleg of 'Mala Noche' and think it's his masterpiece filled with the themes that would become universal in all his films; lonely fringe characters, longing, alienation, etc.

I can't wait for this disc!