SXSW Film

The Lost Coast

Metaphor abounds on the Lost Coast: Mossy, fern-draped trails drip with cloudy innuendo; an angry, churning Pacific roars as cleansing boundary; desolate parking lots and the street crush that is the Castro at Halloween inspire contemplations of inner emptiness. Likewise, homage in the forms of a Bergman bauta, an Antonioni corpse, or a Truffaut brim-tip (“I’m a French guy! From the Sixties!”) all deliver narrative blows. Even the title itself, words taken separately or together, imply literal and figurative journeys taken by the film’s quadrangle of gay/straight lovers/friends, adrift in confusion and awash in the trappings and revelations that come with quarterlife. Through this lens, the film’s overt symbolism becomes less cloying, more elegant, a symbol itself – a meditative, timeless ode to that trying decade between adolescence and acumen, when everything is loaded and epic and literary and, yes, even filmic, if for one foggy San Francisco night.