Gus Van Sant's new film fails to come alive despite some promising ideas, and ends up a frustrating portrait of a mis-judged young couple...
Restless, the latest film from revered director Gus Van Sant, is very concerned with its own mortality. The characters are too, with young couple Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) and Enoch (Henry Hopper) not only meeting at a funeral, but parting at one too.
Enoch is a strange boy, a high-school drop out who we’re aware has some emotional and familial issues to deal with. We see him living with his aunt in a huge house, but we also see him reject her help and obvious affection in favour or attending stranger’s memorials and playing battleship with his ghost friend. If this all sounds a little off-the-wall, it should. Restless doesn’t seem to want to do anything in the conventional way, much like a rebellious teenager, determined to subvert everything ‘normal’, even if normal might have been better.
Annabel and Enoch meet at one of the crashed funerals that Enoch frequents, and quickly strike up a friendship based on their shared self-interest. It turns out they both have good reason for being preoccupied with death, as Enoch’s parents were recently killed in a car accident and Annabel is suffering from terminal cancer. The doctors have given her three months to live, and the pair decides to spend those precious moments with each other. They experience the kind of relationship typical to films like Restless, taking bike rides together and, somewhat strangely, lying within chalk outlines of each other’s bodies.
When Enoch is not spending time with his new girlfriend, he’s hanging out with Hiroshi, a dead kamikaze pilot who has haunted him since waking from the fateful car crash that killed his family. Hiroshi is either the strongest or weakest link in the story, and which one you leave with depends entirely on whether you decide his inherent inconsistencies are deliberate or the product of
Enoch is a strange boy, a high-school drop out who we’re aware has some emotional and familial issues to deal with. We see him living with his aunt in a huge house, but we also see him reject her help and obvious affection in favour or attending stranger’s memorials and playing battleship with his ghost friend. If this all sounds a little off-the-wall, it should. Restless doesn’t seem to want to do anything in the conventional way, much like a rebellious teenager, determined to subvert everything ‘normal’, even if normal might have been better.
Annabel and Enoch meet at one of the crashed funerals that Enoch frequents, and quickly strike up a friendship based on their shared self-interest. It turns out they both have good reason for being preoccupied with death, as Enoch’s parents were recently killed in a car accident and Annabel is suffering from terminal cancer. The doctors have given her three months to live, and the pair decides to spend those precious moments with each other. They experience the kind of relationship typical to films like Restless, taking bike rides together and, somewhat strangely, lying within chalk outlines of each other’s bodies.
When Enoch is not spending time with his new girlfriend, he’s hanging out with Hiroshi, a dead kamikaze pilot who has haunted him since waking from the fateful car crash that killed his family. Hiroshi is either the strongest or weakest link in the story, and which one you leave with depends entirely on whether you decide his inherent inconsistencies are deliberate or the product of
