BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL: Left unfinished following the unexpected death of its star, River Phoenix, George Sluizer’s Dark Blood has assumed something of a mythical status among the actor’s many fans—if not for cinephiles, for whom the Dutch filmmaker’s career both arrived and peaked with a single film, 1998’s still-terrifying thriller The Vanishing.
What does survive of Phoenix’s performance, only serves to burnish his reputation.
Now 80 years old, and with an eye on posterity—he speaks, in the opening voiceover, of having weathered a serious illness—the director has at last assembled the existing footage and created a final cut; 18 years after it was begun, the film premiered last October at the Netherlands Film Festival, before making a rather larger splash at this year’s Berlinale, where it screened Out of Competition.
Phoenix collapsed and died outside the Viper Room in Los Angeles on October 31, 1993, and production halted while the insurers and producers tried to determine whether the film could be salvaged. But certain key scenes involving the actor were never shot, and 18 days later the project was abandoned. Sluizer’s solution—and, barring animated or CGI sequences, it’s the only possible option, in the circumstances—is to interrupt the story at these moments with a voiceover, taken directly from the shooting script, to narrate the events we’re not seeing.
To my surprise, I found myself wishing there had been more of this. Given that the film is not and can never be an integral work—it is, the director remarks early on, at best 'a broken chair’, albeit one which now has three legs, instead of merely two—its status as a self-sustaining narrative is always going to be compromised. The most sensible solution, surely, would be to make the film a meta-text: a commentary on its own protracted making. But while the result certainly gestures in this direction—a few of Sluizer’s interjections are personal reminiscences, rather than simply narrative descriptions—it doesn’t quite go far enough to become the blend of making-of documentary and fiction that might make it more than a curio.
That’s not to say, however, that what’s onscreen is bad. Quite the contrary: tense, charged and surprisingly compelling, it hints at what might have been a modestly accomplished little thriller, in the vein of Polanski’s Knife in the Water—and also an interesting meeting-point between Hollywood’s conventions and aesthetic, and the director’s own preference for downbeat, morally compromised endings. Had it been completed, Sluizer’s career, you suspect, might look quite different today.
A husband and wife, both actors en route to Los Angeles, break down in the desert of the American southwest, in the vicinity of a former nuclear testing ground. Looking for help, the woman (Judy Davis) stumbles upon a shack inhabited by a young man (Phoenix), who claims to be part-Indian, and who is waiting for the immanent end of the world. He sends their car to a local mechanic—but also takes a distinct shine to the woman, and it soon becomes apparent that he will not let them go.
Much of the missing footage involves the escalation of sexual attraction between Davis’s character and Phoenix’s, and oddly, the use of narration—of telling rather than showing—actually heightens rather than diminishes the erotic tension, here. And what does survive of Phoenix’s performance, only serves to burnish his reputation. Ambiguous, capricious, and almost impossibly beautiful throughout (seriously: what a face!), he commands the screen, projecting a tender kind of innocence, a wounded distance from the world, that’s not only beguiling, but which exists quite independent of the viewer’s foreknowledge of his fate. It’s easy to see why Davis’s character falls for him, and why Jonathan Pryce’s husband feels so instantly, utterly threatened.
The desert exteriors are ravishingly photographed, by Ed Lachmann, and the production design, by Jan Roelfs and the late Ben van Os—both of whom worked extensively with Peter Greenaway—is dense and mesmerising. Like the performances, and Sluizer’s taut, understated direction, all hinting at what might have been, if only . . .
But really, the mere fact that this almost-film exists—even in this compromised, fragmentary and frequently frustrating state—is a kind of minor miracle. Let’s hope it’s judged for what it is, rather than what it is not; that it doesn’t fall victim to unreasonable expectations. As its director admits, this chair, while serviceable, is by no means perfect. And not nearly strong enough to bear any extra weight.
