Mala Noche

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...

Gus Van Sant's Auspicious Debut
Mala Noche was Gus Van Sant's feature film debut and an early example of what would become known as New Queer Cinema in the 1990s. More significantly, it was the first film in an informal trilogy set in Portland, Oregon that would also include Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho - Criterion Collection. One can see, in retrospect, Mala Noche as the thematic blueprint for these two other films: a fascination with street life and the characters that inhabit it - hustlers, store clerks and street kids.

The film has a gritty look thanks to the murky black and white cinematography of John Campbell (who would work with Van Sant again on My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) that suggests film noir (with skewed angles and everything filmed in...

Van Sant's first, and not his best.
Before Gus Van Sant assumed the role of indie figurehead with earnestly progressive biopics and earnestly plotless art-house fodder, he made low-budget films about marginal people with risky lifestyles. There were three of them: Mala Noche (the first), Drugstore Cowboy (by far the best), and My Own Private Idaho (watchable, but already starting to lose the plot). Mala Noche is about a grungy grocery store clerk who becomes attracted to, and wants to be accepted by, a group of illegal immigrants from Mexico.

Van Sant's use of black-and-white in this film was largely dictated by budget constraints, but it effectively uses darkness to make the city look dangerous. The use of shadow may have...

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