“What is the point?” our shitty “hero” shouts at one point during a fight with his wife, a question I found myself asking throughout this film. I likely would never have watched this had it not been in the 1001 Films book—I vaguely recall reading director Jon Jost’s name somewhere but otherwise knew bugger all about his work—and would have missed nothing… I was, as you probably don’t recall, pondering a while ago the lack of “respectable” cinema on my list for the Century of Cinema project, so I decided to go for “serious and arthouse” again tonight, and strike another title of the 1001 Films watchlist while I was at it. It’s one of the harder films to obtain on the list and it was not worth the effort. Our aforementioned shitty “hero” is Tom, a truck driver who’s out of work and not trying too hard to find new work, which is pissing his wife off cos he leaves her behind for weeks at a time on his nominal trips to get a job, and the film ends with him murdering another man for his money, and I suppose we’re meant to assume this is how he’s been surviving without a job. I gather the whole thing is meant to be a critique of how capitalism ruins the lives of people like Tom, and JESUS FUCK WHO CARES, cos Tom is so unlikeable and uninteresting that I don’t give a fuck for his plight and how capitalism has driven him to to point he’s at. He is such an absolute bore that the film, telling a story (barely) about emptiness, just becomes vacuous itself. Last Chants was a famously cheap production, clocking in somewhere between two and three thousand dollars; I admire to a certain extent how Jost worked around those limitations but not the end result. I will say that Jost, who also wrote and sang the songs scattered through the film, is a reasonably good singer. Beyond that, I don’t think I have any further use for his other work; happy to leave Jost as a one-time thing.
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