The Lost Coast

I attended the World Premiere of "The Lost Coast," which was in the narrative features competition at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. It's an emotionally charged film that has broad appeal despite its controversial subject matter.

"The Lost Coast" is a tale told in real time of a trio of high school friends, Mark, Jasper, and Lily, who reunite one Halloween for a night of good cheer. Memories of an unspoken sexual past between the two boys come back to haunt them as night turns to day and each must confront his or her own fears and beliefs. What may have been typical teen experimentation at the time is now an obstacle to continued friendship.

Director Gabriel Fleming places us in the position of an observer -- a voyeur, almost -- as we watch the events unfold at a slow, deliberate pace. The film has an unscripted feel and the action is punctuated by the device used to tell the story -- Jasper (who is now straight) is emailing his girlfriend about the experience he had this night with Mark (who is now gay) and revealing his past to her. He types, we see, and so on.

"The Lost Coast" definitely has an indie feel, with natural lighting and simple visuals. The exteriors in and around San Francisco and the Pacific coastline are truly breathtaking. The score was a highlight for me -- the haunting music, long takes and tracking shots with generous use of hand-held camera, and the film's slow pace reminded me of "Mean Creek," one of my all-time favorite indies. It's a style that builds tension and is best used when a study of relationships is at the heart of the story, which perfectly applies here.

This is the type of character-driven piece which does well at festivals but often has a tough go of it even on the art house circuit. It will have an audience on DVD, though, as there are several distributors who would jump at the chance to pick up a film in this genre.

I really want the producers of this movie to pay me for my lost time spent watching this flick....they tricked me into thinking something interesting was going to happen, but it never did. Four unlikable young adults just wander the streets and parks of San Francisco hoping to score some Ecstasy in order to liven things up. The central character just became more unlikable during the climax sex scene and his ride home on the bus. I should have given this movie a one, but I felt sorry for everyone involved in this project.

Despite whatever aesthetic pluses and minuses this obscure 2008 independent film by Gabriel Fleming contains (and there are arguments to be made mostly for it in terms of its extraordinary musical score, dream-like pacing, excellent performances, and exquisitely atmospheric cinematography as well as against it for its rather predictable storyline) one cannot help oneself from becoming pulled in and fascinated by the strange and disturbing undertones beneath this tale of painfully unrequited and deeply repressed passions that takes place in a flashback-laced but mainly dusk-to-dawn period on a Halloween night in San Francisco, suffused with what appears to be the factual actualities of youthful and tragic early death, serving as an overriding metaphor for a personal and inevitable loss of innocence. Notice, if you will, the emphatic presence of a wall poster of legendary goth band Joy Division (23-year-old lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980), the quick, subtle cuts to on-rushing emergency 911 vehicles, and the casual remarks about wanting to die before reaching the age of 30, including the obvious visual signifiers of skeletons, ghosts, and most significantly a haunting and expressively funereal mask that essentially acts as the film's Greek chorus and central symbolic conceit (the covering over of true feelings, the false façade of gender roles and identities, the burial of past secrets) as our four main characters wander aimlessly through the anonymous and party-packed city streets in search of an indefinable and increasingly desperate "good time", eventually stumbling on to the abandoned corpse of a young man in the middle of Golden Gate Park under an ice-blue moon in the last and lonely hours of the fading holiday. Their nocturnal (if not metaphysical) journey from crowded urban spaces towards the liberating primal landscape of the forest allows tortured revelations to finally rise to the surface along with a rainy and emotionally cleansing November morning. Thoughts drift back to the night actor River Phoenix died on the streets of West Hollywood in the early morning hours of Halloween 1993, and whether or not that particularly tragic and generation-defining moment in time was on the mind of the director, one cannot help but ponder its relation to both the body in the park and one of the climactic lines of dialogue at the break of dawn ("the sun wont be rising for us") that surrounds its main theme of heartbreak, psychological self-deception, and the deep and lasting scars of societal and sexual hypocrisy.

A slow, plodding film that takes forever to get to a disappointing climax (pun intended, if you bother to watch this film).

The cinematography is pretty decent for a low-budget film, and the storyline has potential, but ultimately fails to deliver.

This one has been bouncing around on the free streaming services for quite a while. I saw it early on and liked it enough to have gone back to watch it again, and then again with liberal fast-forwarding. Low-budget and slow, but has some real chemistry and moments of truth.

Ian Scott McGregor and Lucas Alifano are the reasons to watch. Their storyline is compelling and rings true, to the point that I would like to see a "sequel"--where do they stand 15 years later?

I am surprised how much hate this has gotten in the reviews. It's very competently done, and the acting is "fine" throughout. I imagine I will be watching it again.