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`MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO` PUTS FILMMAKING IN A GREAT STATE

Beautifully wrought, darkly funny and finally devastating, ”My Own Private Idaho” almost single-handedly revives the notion of personal filmmaking in the United States.

As the title suggests, this new film by Gus Van Sant (”Drugstore Cowboy”) is an intensely subjective one, mixing fantasy and autobiography, public texts (including great hunks of William Shakespeare`s ”Henry IV”

plays) and private speculations.

There are corners of the film that will remain impossible to illuminate, and yet this sprinkling of enigma, of the unknowable and unreadable, is what gives the movie its force and staying power.

In a move that will either elevate his career to a new level or sink it entirely, teen idol River Phoenix plays Mike Waters, a timid, spacey street kid of uncertain background who supports himself, though just marginally, by renting his body to lonely gay men (and the occasional bored housewife) in Portland, Ore. Mike has a major professional handicap in the form of his incurable narcolepsy-a disease that casts him into a deep, twitching sleep during moments of stress.

Mike`s best friend is a fellow hustler, Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves, natty and confident), who is on the streets by choice. Scott`s father happens to be the all-powerful mayor of Portland, but Scott-following in the footsteps and much of the dialogue of Shakespeare`s Prince Hal-has chosen to prepare for his kingly destiny by apprenticing himself to the blustering, voracious local Falstaff, a petty thief and drug addict named Bob Pigeon (an impressive acting debut by director William Richert).

Mike is in love with Scott, but Scott is in love only with his destiny, which will one day require him to betray all of his street acquaintances.

There is not much more to the plot than that, but this is a film of breathtakingly free and constant movement. The device of Mike`s narcolepsy allows Van Sant to make wildly impulsive, radical transitions (Mike falls asleep and awakes in another scene, another state or even in another country). And more than that, it allows Van Sant to create complex, poetic montage sequences that, in mingling dream and reality through poetically related images, pick up where Sergei Eisenstein`s most extreme experiments in associational editing left off back in the 1920s.

In the opening sequence, Mike dreams himself in the middle of an endless, empty metaphorical road in the middle of Idaho, flashes onto images of a nurturing, now lost mother, imagines a fragile abandoned farmhouse outlined against the sky, and then summons up an image of home-seeking salmon swimming upstream through clear mountain water before waking up in a seedy Seattle hotel room, where he is having sex with a client.

So graceful is Van Sant`s work here, so elegant and expressive its juxtaposition of open and closed spaces, of warm and cool colors and rough and smooth textures, that it immediately surpasses much of the experimental filmmaking of the last 20 years. And yet the sequence, as formally inventive as it is, is perfectly comprehensible in narrative terms, setting up Mike`s character with a clarity and precision that would require reams of

conventional dialogue.

Ultimately, ”My Own Private Idaho” is about home and belonging, things that seem always to elude Mike but come to Scott almost too easily. Scott joins Mike on a voyage to Idaho in search of Mike`s long-lost mother; Mike`s eccentric older brother (James Russo) directs them to a distant motel (”The Family Tree”) and a clue left behind there points to a farmhouse in Italy. But they are always too late, and finally, Mike is alone.

There is no more heartbreaking image in recent cinema than that of an exhausted Phoenix curling up to sleep on a sidewalk, oblivious to the shards of broken glass that lie next to his cheek.

”My Own Private Idaho” would be a vision of almost unbearable sadness if Van Sant did not know how to balance his film`s fundamental melancholy with wild explosions of humor (Udo Kier as a dyspeptic German client, a conversation among the cover boys on a rack of gay porn magazines) and delicate intimations of hope.

This is a very rich, very sympathetic piece of work.

”MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO”

(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)

Directed and written by Gus Van Sant; photographed by Eric Alan Edwards and John Campbell; production designed by David Brisbin; edited by Curtiss Clayton; music by Bill Stafford; produced by Laurie Parker. A Fine Line Features release; opens Oct. 18 at the Broadway and Esquire theaters. Running time: 1:45. MPAA rating: R. Adult situations, strong language, nudity.

THE CAST

Mike Waters…………………River Phoenix

Scott Favor…………………Keanu Reeves

Richard Waters………………James Russo

Bob Pigeon………………….William Richert

Hans……………………….Udo Kier