Mala Noche

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): *****

After the debate and controversy surrounding the recent Darjeeling Limited (did everyone just suddenly realize en masse Wes Anderson had racial issues?), Criterion's release of Gus Van Sant's directorial debut Mala Noche serves as a fine reminder that it is possible to make films about romantic relationships between people who are on unlevel playing fields without rendering one of the people (psst, the brown one) mute or a ridiculous caricature.

Based on the autobiographical novella by Walt Curtis, Walt (did I mention autobiographical?) is a cashier in a seedy liquor store obsessed with Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), one of the young Mexican immigrant rentboys who works the streets of downtown Portland. Johnny is uninterested but has fun hanging out and toying with Walt (played by Tim Streeter). Johnny endures the trials of his legal status with humor and good spirit, he's constantly hungry, getting evicted and being chased by the police. Walt offers him safe (albeit somewhat lecherously) harbor with no small amount of white- and class-guilt-induced smugness about the nature of his generosity. Walt isn't always an easy character to like but his youthful pretensions and ignorance are well-balanced out by his painfully earnest lust and his ability to laugh at himself when Johnny gets the better of him.

Despite the film's micro-budget limitations, Mala Noche was an enormous critical success and was named Best Independent Film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards. The film is credited with being the catalyst for the New Queer Cinema movement in the nineties that opened the door to film-makers like Gregg Araki, Cheryl Dunye, Todd Haynes, Bruce LaBruce, Rose Troche and Mary Harron.

There's a life lesson in the fact that such an salient and inventive film was rejected by Sundance the year it came out only to be chosen as the centerpiece of a digital projection presentation twenty years later: Mala Noche streamed in HD simultaneously to three cities from a server located in Portland and laid to rest concerns that digital projection would degrade visual quality.

And with this event Mala Noche has come full circle as a film that galvanized a queer cinema revolution in the eighties and nineties and has now been elemental in ushering a digital revolution that will provide low-budget film-makers with a feasible alternative to the prohibitively expensive process of blowing up their films to 35mm and striking multiple prints.

The DVD extras for this gorgeous Criterion re-issue include: a 25 minute interview with Gus Van Sant, a Bill Plympton-directed documentary about Mala Noche author Walt Curtis, storyboards and original trailer.

See also: My Beautiful Laundrette, Half-Cocked, Salt of the Earth, Hustler White, L.I.E., My Own Private Idaho.