Restless

Gus Van Sant

Restless is a teen romance where the stakes are supposed to be heightened because of the spectre of death hanging over the characters but instead, it feels blanched of any meaningful drama.

No mean feat considering Enoch (Henry Hopper) crashes strangers’ memorials, has a ghost kamikaze pilot Hiroshi (Ryo Kase) for a friend and falls for Annabel (Mia Wasikowska), who turns out to have cancer.

Director Gus Van Sant has done intriguing work before with unusual material, including My Own Private Idaho (1991), a very loose take on Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V, and Elephant (2003), about a high school shooting.

Here, he merely seems content to film everything prettily.

Henry Hopper, son of the late Dennis Hopper, has beautifully mussed-up hair while the gamine Wasikowska is pale and glamorously ill with her pixie-crop haircut.

Local actor Chin Han barely registers in a small role as a doctor. He is just another adult who hardly figures in the hermetic world of Enoch and Annabel.

Soporific, ponderous and self-consciously precious, the film left me feeling restless all right.

(ST)