There’s a lot to unpack in Lost Boys. Morally and stylistically. For starters, we are looking at what happened to Finnish junkies Jani and Antti, who disappeared in Cambodia (one dead, the other missing), solely from the point of view of their erstwhile travel companion Joonas Neuvonen, who is returning to investigate.
Neuvonen, himself a convicted drugs dealer, had left Cambodia before Jani died. Does that automatically absolve him from any responsibility in what was officially declared a suicide, but many suspect was murder? As one person in the documentary notes, it doesn’t cost much in Cambodia to have someone taken out. Jani’s death may have been related to drug debts, in which several people could have been involved. But if Neuvonen did do, or know, something that incriminated himself, he most likely wouldn’t tell us.
Instead, we follow Neuvonen who, through hearsay and suspicions, leads us to question the roles of Jani’s prostitute girlfriend Lee Lee, his friend Antti who has since gone missing and indeed Jani himself who was, Neuvonen asserts, “going crazy.” With Neuvonen staying behind the camera he is thus, literally and figuratively, out of the picture.
Neuvonen shot a lot of material of Jani and Antti and Lee Lee and others when they were travelling together. Even when they were just hanging around in their hotel room. Which raises another, more general question: how interesting is it to spend so much time – for him filming and for us watching – people who seem to do little more than smoke drugs and shoot up?
The trick is that the film is often dazzling. Neuvonen has a feel for moody neon lighting and dramatic angles, filming night-time Bangkok and Phnom Penh as if in a daze; greatly aided by the editing and soundscapes. Impressionistic flashes, sometimes shot so close as to become abstract, and atmospheric shots of dark corridors, dank alleys, slow-motion street life, candle-lit temples and out-of-focus hotel rooms are carried along by rumbling bass sounds and distorted treble. We are systematically forced into Neuvonen’s nightmarish point of view, looking at the world around us as a paradise gone to hell.
This would all work well in a fiction feature. And Lost Boys is perhaps at its best when it’s focussing on this artistically enhanced insider’s impression of the drug-fuelled underbelly of Western tourism in Thailand and Cambodia, with red light districts and street pushers. In fiction cinema, I regularly enjoy being forced into a questionable subjectivity. But as a documentary viewer, I experience resistance. Especially when it’s done with such clearly manipulative – but effective – means as fast cutting, blurry images and deep droning bass lines.
And now we get to Neuvonen’s voice-over. Its style, the constantly low, slow monotonous voice, in combination with the South-East Asian setting, immediately brings to mind Captain Willard, the protagonist in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). And that film’s opening scene is explicitly referenced when Neuvonen is waiting in a hotel room for news, surrounded by empty bottles and saying, in voice-over: “I’ve been here a week.” As another hint, at one point in the documentary the neon lights of a Heart of Darkness Club glide through the frame.
This voice-over by the way is not in Finnish, but in English. And it’s not colloquial, but dramatised and recited. The end credits mention Pekka Strang as narrator – so it isn’t even Neuvonen’s voice. Did he write it? There are three script writers involved – maybe they just dramatized the text until it felt good? Until it made a good movie? It’s precisely this disembodied voice, constantly in our head, that has the most direct influence on how we interpret what we see. It raises the sneaking suspicion that everything documentary about the film was just used to create better, more sensational drama.
Some background information. Ten years earlier, Joonas Neuvonen’s Reindeerspotting starred Jani as its main protagonist. The documentary showed the drug scene in Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, its title echoing Scottish junkie drama Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996). In this documentary (which won the Critics Week Award in Locarno), Neuvonen took Jani, who was desperate to leave Rovaniemi, on a trip through Europe, visiting cities like Paris and Barcelona. After the successful release of that film, Jani, Antti and Joonas left for South-East Asia – which is where the story of Lost Boys begins. A sequel of sorts.
In the end, I cannot deny that I’m fascinated by Lost Boys. Although I’m still uncertain about certain stylistic and moral choices (an incongruous montage combining explicit sex and archive material of the Khmer Rouge to the tones of the Marseillaise being an example), ultimately I see the psychological resistance the documentary provokes as part of the experience. To my surprise, I saw my ambivalence mirrored in how Lost Boys’ two directors described the film themselves, as noted in the press kit. For Neuvonen, simply, ‘its aim [is] to tell the truth’.
But Sadri Cetinkaya’s description comes much closer to my own experience: ‘[A] documentary about a state of mind where memories and lies are intertwined to tell a story to the storyteller himself. (…) His search is a means for running away and a tale built of distorted memories that conceals the unpleasant truth about both his own state and about his relationship with his friends.’
Sales for Lost Boys are handled by First Hand Films.
