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Road To Nowhere by Monte HellmanArticle de Siclones le 20 avr 2011 dans A l'affiche | 1 commentaire

Sortie le 13 avril 2011

His last film was 20 years ago and was titled Silent Night, Deadly Night: Irreversible Coma.At the time, a video store employee contacted Monte Hellman to direct a film from hisscript ... finally, the guy changed his mind and directed Reservoir Dogs himself. Hellmannevertheless appreciated the project enough to agree to act as executive-producer in orderto find the funding. In 2010, the two find themselves at the Mostra of Venice, one is

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president and the other the oldest director in the competition. Not ungrateful, theTarantino jury will present a Golden Lion to Hellman for the entire body of his work. Andyet, like the young director at the end of Coppola’s , Tetro the failure (commercially) fromthe stable of the legendary Roger Corman (Coppola and De Palma / Scorsese ...) seems tobe beginning a second youth.

It’s difficult and inevitably not very necessary to summarize the story of  Road To Nowhere. A  blogger has rekindled some interest in an old case which had rocked the peaceful SmokyMoutains of North Carolina a few years earlier. The ingredients were a politician with anarrogant success, a cop at the end of his road, an irresistible Cuban 30 years the junior of theother two, Velma Duran, and the disappearance of $100,000,000. A classic thriller plot, to suchan extent that very soon we will abandon the idea of trying to grasp the ins and outs. Director,Mitchell Haven, and his screenwriter seize investigations of this blogger to draw a film project:Road To Nowhere, which the Road To Nowhere of Monte Hellman recounts during its shootingas well as its preparation.

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 Road to Nowhere – Bande-annonce – 2011

 Road To Nowhere plays the card of the setting in abyss ... but in a manner so brilliant that itwould be difficult to give you a reference source. Seeking to count the number of dimensionsintertwined between other scams reported, the film in the film with even the right to its own maintitle credits, and its filming, then the projected film and even a few episodes experienced by

Monte Hellman , would be insane.1. One could guess it more instinctively than by taking a ticketfrom Mulholland Drive, in Road To Nowhere the viewer is released, right from the start. We canalso find an inverted structure, where Lynch quietly unrolled the glamour aesthetic of wellknown series Z to end up imploding the tale, meanwhile Hellman takes the risk of escapingtrouble from the beginning, where the blasting of the narrative is even more confusing throughhis particular style of long almost stationary takes, nearly-silent and extended in time, proving to be sparing of explanation. But two hours later, a miracle happened and I came out with afascination that time does not stop nourishing for a film that encourages us to seek outside keys; beginning with the sublime poster which follows you right out of the cinema.

In the middle of the film, the director obstinately wants no supertar for the distribution, sayingthat the success of a film is 90% dependent on casting. Monte Hellman modifies this in an

interview, saying this also includes the choice of locations and technicians ... anyway, just bychoosing to embody Shannyn Sossamon as Laurel Graham / Velma Duran, one can alreadyconsider the cast as a success. Ubiquitous from beginning to end, even the haunting image of theend credits (and perhaps beyond), the actress carries the film without the need to push in thetrenches with the kind of spectacle becoming customary with directors, and that Watts, Portmanand Gainsbourg had to try in establishing recognition for their talents: neither masturbation nor lesbian experimentation, self-mutilation or hysteria here ... In this case, there is first of all theincarnation of the mystery of Velma Duran, of course, where it is unclear whether she died or 

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simply disappeared with the loot, even reappearing to play herself, taunting the whole world ... but when this question then is answered as prematurely hoped for in a story that will die soon,the information appears as anecdotal so much is one caught up by something indefinable.

Something that escapes the mystery screenwriter who accepts the generic term Femme Fatale inthe first film in the film, and who keeps warning his director friend that his love for his actress  puts the whole project in jeopardy. Laurel dries her nails, Laurel ties her shoelaces, Laurellaments being a bad actress while watching rushes, Laurel huddles against a man to stop his fit of  jealousy, Laurel is upset and vibrates her lips while blowing through them, Laurel has her littlenose all wet while watching a DVD of The Spirit of the Beehive ... rarely with so muchsimplicity have we had the opportunity to celebrate a woman, the Woman (?), through cinema.Mathematically, most other roles, all male except that of the blogger who will show her buttwrapped blithely in lace in the foreground, will suffer from the comparison ... but willnevertheless remain the tragicomic spectacle of a very male resignation, more or less acute, andtaking many fascinating forms.

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Two Lane Blacktop – Bande-annonce

Of course, this film is dedicated to a woman who was already someone to make you stop andturn around. Laurie Bird, an actress who committed suicide at age 25 and who lived a love storywith Monte Hellman during the filming of Two-Lane Blacktop. In this film, probably the least

spectacular car movie ever made, a driver and his mechanic (played by Dennis Wilson) drive asouped up, to make it win drag races, 55 Chevrolet across the U.S. They cross the path of ahitchhiker played by Laurie Bird, then a pathological liar who wanders inside a Pontiac GTOseeking hitchhikers to tell his dream life. The cars quickly a bet on a race across hundreds of miles to bring our characters to Washington, D.C. At the last stop before the finish line, the girlwho had turned the heads of at least one of the drivers, goes off with a biker. The other rivals inthe face of an accomplished fact are left to head back to new restless wanderings, without sayinga word. The camera follows them through two scenes of absurd rides typical of the work of Hellman, and then in the course of an upteenth drag race, the film burns. All this was onlycinema ...

In other aspects, Road To Nowhere

can be seen as the film-summation of its author. LeonardoDiCaprio is interviewed about Jack Nicholson, one of the first of Hellman collaborators, MitchellHaven (first pseudonym of Hellman when he staged Beckett) speaks about the frustration that anartist can feel faced with lawyers, managers and other businessmen in the movie industry, whileMonte says without bitterness that he never stopped working although he was never able to get afilm made in the last twenty years, or even the appearance in full climax of a camera Canon 5Dused to shoot the film and metafilm, and even earlier the budget digressions about this equipmentcould be taken into account in this biographical balance sheet. But in truth, Road To Nowhere iswell beyond the boundaries of self-centeredness, to earn its stripes as a true film-buff fantasy. In

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absolute generosity, whatever seems cold and silent like a blond offering half her cigar to a dying person, for his (rare, no doubt) audience, Road To Nowhere even invites us to see more moviesinvariably described by Mitchell as ‘masterpiece’ as he shows them to Laurel. So this time,instead of releasing his viewers in the burning of his film ... Hellman drowns them withoutfeeling guilty.

 Not free from the defects inherent in the style of this arid filmmaker, defects which are perhapsnot really a fault, Road To Nowhere is added to the list of curiosities signed by Hellman.Probably the most generous and enthusiastic that this person greatly underestimated byHollywood has ever offered. Alas, such a reward is reserved fundamentally for film enthusiasts basically coming back from a certain sensationalism whose provocative resonances finallyimpact a larger world beyond academia and other international juries that more often reward performance than talent, this film in absurd and spellbinding accents exudes a beauty andintelligence that it would be criminal in any case to avoid. But with less than 30 copies in thecountry, better not waste any more time.

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 It’s my hollywood piece of shit movie – Monte Hellman //O.H.N.K. production

 Road To Nowhere de Monte Hellman | Scénario de Steven Gaydos | Photographie de Joseph M.Civit | Musique de Tom Russell | Avec Shannyn Sossamon, Tygh Runyan, Dominique Swain,Cliff De Young, Robert Kolar, John Diehl, Waylon Payne, Fabio Testi, Lathan McKay, MalloryCulbert, Bonnie Pointer | Etats-Unis | 2010 | 121 min. | Policier et romance | Distribué par Capricci Films | Crédit photographique : Capricci Films