FREE ON CINEGEEK.De Gus Van Sant - My Own Private Idaho 

A person suffering from narcolepsy is dependent on the help of his environment. If he stays asleep somewhere on the street, someone has to carry him away. River Phoenix plays Mike Waters the narcoleptic in Gus van Sant's drama. It's hard for him to really get involved, because sleep can overpower him at any time. Needless to say, the illness is not conducive to Mike's work as a prostitute. Mike lives in an unreal world, his own. We have to imagine it like he's on drugs. He exists outside the calendar that applies to us - within his own conditions. Phoenix embodies him as a fool, as a clownish figure. His only attention is to Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), another hustler. One comes from a rich family, the other from poor backgrounds. The origin of both, however, is irrelevant for the time they now spend together: Letting themselves drift through strange cars and hotel rooms, taking on fantasy roles, chatting for hours in coffee shops... They are something like sex outlaws of life on the periphery. If we look for literary role models (and that's what Gus van Sant's film is all about), we find them in the classics, not in psychedelic pop literature. Is the essence of the film even too human comedy? Is it about loneliness and deep sadness, but with the knowledge how ridiculous every human feeling is in the end? Isn't what we perceive as deadly serious basically absurd? How many of the director's films does My Own Private Idaho play in the northwest, in Portland? There it's the outsiders who exist on the street that Van Sant pays attention to. There are no big plans for them, only a bed overnight and some change to survive. Mike and Scott meet a wide variety of customers, including the man who keeps his apartment neurotically clean. At one point it almost seems as if they are no longer in Idaho, but in Italy... Although the two main characters are hustlers, My Own Private Idaho is less about sex. I think sex doesn't interest the two prostitutes at all, it's work. Mike is looking for love, but if he is honest, he needs someone to protect him, to hold him. He suffered a lot of mental damage during his childhood, now he's looking for a guardian - whether a man or a woman. We don't get a classic Hollywood plot. The film - just like the life of both of them - does not drift towards a fixed point.