There is an
unmistakable sense when watching Jon Jost’s Last
Chants for a slow Dance (1977) that you are watching something being born
and something dying. One way of life,
and of filmmaking, draws its last breath while a new America and a new American
cinematic movement are emerging from the second great period of U.S. filmmaking. The irony is, of course, that Last Chants was released in the same year
as Star Wars (1977), the film that
effectively ended – with its product tie-ins and lines around the block – the Hollywood
interest in personal filmmaking, splitting the industry into the blockbuster
driven studios and what we now call the independent American cinema.
Last
Chants is at the forefront of the latter movement, and indeed much of what
was to come from independently financed movies over the next two decades owes
its look and feel to this film. The
obvious comparison is Henry: Portrait of
a Serial Killer (1990), but I was struck by how much Last Chants’ antihero Tom Bates (Tom Blair) was resembled in the
River Phoenix character in Gus Van Sant’s My
own Private Idaho. Those sunglasses,
that hair, the denim, the sense of wandering; they’re all there in Van Sant’s
film.
Last
Chants for a Slow Dance doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a central
figure. Bates (I wonder why Jost chose
that name…) is a drifter. He has a wife,
Darlene (Jessicas St. John), and two boys, Billy and Bobby, but he’s only at
home with them for a brief segment of the film.
He and Darlene argue about the things that he’s told another drifter
that they argue about, and he’s on his way again, ostensibly looking for work,
but really looking for a way out. He
sits in bars and diners, talking to other customers, always trying to get laid,
but he never betrays any sense of real motivation. He wants to be free to sit in bars and diners
it seems, and to try to get laid. He’s
got no money for anything other than smokes, drinks, and gas, and while he
seems bitter about the state of things, he’s resigned to find comfort in the
fact that “you can’t get ahead.”
Country music, mostly ballads, play
on the radio as he drives across Montana.
He calls Darlene from the apartment of a woman he’s just had a one night
stand with and their conversation sounds like it’s the same one they’ve had a
hundred times before. He hangs up and
tells the woman that he was talking to his boss, then realizes that he doesn’t really
care if she knows now that he’s married.
There isn’t much more to Tom than
what meets the eye. He’s almost all Id
and libido, with any elements of concealment only lasting long enough to convince
a woman into bed. Jost finds a way to develop
his shallow character economically, using very few shots and sparse cutaways
that are effective if not overbearing.
The slaughter of a rabbit in close-up effectively stands in for other
acts of violence, while conveying the desperation of Tom to break free from a
life that is in actuality not so terribly restrictive. He’s a rebel without a cause and as such, he
seems so desperate to simplify life to animalistic urges. As a portrait of 1970s America he is thus
effective, conveying a need to dismiss traditional values and norms while
denying the need to establish a newly sufficient median.
Made for only $12,000, and
comprised of fewer than one hundred 16mm shots, Last Chants for a Slow Dance is, in the eyes of many, the prototype
for the latter 20th century independent film. Jost is hinting at so much by saying so
little here, and though Last Chants is
a difficult and vexing movie, it’s an interesting contrast to other 1970s
statement pictures. It’s infinitely more
interesting that Two-Lane Blacktop (1971),
and, as the 1001 text points out, refreshingly less muddled than Nashville (1975).
Language: English*
Runtime: 90 Minutes
Grade: 2.5 Hats Off
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