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Review

Ever wondered what it might look like if legendary experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger collaborated with cerebral French auteurs Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais on a remake of the classic 1950s Brando biker pic The Wild One? No? Well, too bad, because we’re going to ask you to watch this peculiar and beautiful little film The Loveless anyway.

An impressive feature film debut for both co-director Kathryn Bigelow and star Willem Dafoe, The Loveless takes the narrative outline of a 50s biker exploitation movie and refracts it through the prism of late-70s/early-80s downtown NYC cool, and while the results might seem potentially pretentious, the film is actually a hauntingly meticulous evocation of a particular time and place (50s American rural south), and a strikingly rich, complex work. Loveless’ story is as spare and minimalist as its formal approach: a gang of bikers, led by Vance (Dafoe in his inaugural role), stop in a small southern town en route to a race in Florida. Tensions flare between the bikers and the fearful town locals – an undercurrent of violence heightened by Vance’s sexual involvement with the young Telena (the eerily beautiful, and sadly subsequently obscure, Marin Kanter) – until conflict comes to a boil in a roadhouse bar one night.

Bigelow co-directed the film with Monty Montgomery (his only directorial effort, though he would later serve as a producer for David Lynch, as well as an actor: he plays “The Cowboy” in Mulholland Drive), and they bring a vibrantly stylized hyper-reality to the material, all fetishistic 50s surface, smooth and slow tracking shots, and perfect use of period music. Bigelow’s subsequent career is, frankly, rather erratic: after Loveless and her superlative 1987 vampire film Near Dark, Bigelow’s career alternated between comparatively generic action movies (Point Break, K-19: The Widowmaker) and interesting and ambitious misfires (Strange Days, The Weight of Water). More than just a striking debut, The Loveless actually remains Bigelow’s strongest work.

 -- Travis Crawford