Desolation Row

Poster art by Kate Prentiss (click here for her website). Click image to enlarge.

I moved from New York to San Francisco thirty years ago and fell in love with its unique culture and personality. Finances forced me back east, but had things been different I would’ve surely stayed in the Bay Area. For me, it was a spellbinding haven with radically different values than the rest of the country.

    Watching Gabriel Fleming’s new film, The Lost Coast (2008), it seems very little of the San Francisco I knew in my early twenties has changed all that much. He uses the city and the remote title spot as an aura circling around a group of characters, in their twenties and groping for direction and purpose. Indeed, those who know San Francisco should find the settings wonderfully evocative: the vibrant Castro district at night, ethereal Golden Gate Park in the wee hours, and the pre-dawn calm of city side streets.

    Together with cinematographer Nils Kenaston, Fleming captures that chilly, clammy, shadowy and serene moment between childhood idealism and the less flexible demands — real or imagined — of maturity. Ian Scott McGregor, Lucas Alifano and Lindsay Benner play a triangle slowly comprehending their ‘fifth wheel’ status with one other. Over the course of Halloween night, undertaking a literal and figurative pursuit of ecstasy, McGregor’s character knows an elusive sales connection for the drug itself. But the two men and the woman drift quietly and meditatively on a quest to fill an inner void where ecstasy becomes little else than a state of nostalgic longing.

    Although painfully honest in its depiction of sexual awareness and ambiguity, The Lost Coast has moments when it seems Fleming is about to lose himself in clumsy homage. The references to Antonioni’s Blowup (the body in the woods) and L’Avventura (the brief search for McGregor), and Benner’s Bergmanesque two-faced Halloween costume are transparent and gimmicky, but they nonetheless fit and work to the film’s advantage.

    The three lead actors deliver excellent portrayals, especially in McGregor’s and Alifano’s unspoken yearning for one another. Introduced along the way, Chris Yule lends quiet and powerful support as a kind of catalyst securing their eventual separation. Combined with Kenaston’s superbly lit vistas of both a city after hours and a wilderness etched in memory, the film taps into the melancholy of desire.



(The Lost Coast will be showing at the SXSW Film Festival on March 8, 10 and 12.)