The hardest question for any documentary filmmaker is simple: when do you stop? When does the story end? When do you say the movie is complete?
Joonas Neuvonen was wise enough to leave his 2011 portrait of Finnish junkies, the graphic and disturbing Reindeerspotting – Escape From Santaland, open-ended, with his friend Jani dreaming of a post-junk life with kids and a house. Lost Boys picks up where that dream died: with Jani dead, hung by an electrical chord in a Cambodian hotel.
Lost Boys is a complex and oppressive journey in the shoes of an addict. It’s part confessional, part true crime diary, and part travelogue through the worst and most debauched corners of Indochinese Peninsula, the kind of bars and cheap motels where a trio of junkies – Neuvonen, Jani, and their friend Antti – can shoot up, find bar girls, shoot up with bar girls, lose a fortune, find new addictions, and still think it’s a step up from breaking into cars in frozen Rovaniemi to pay for their Subutex addiction.
Neuvonen is no innocent: a dealer, a junkie, charged and convicted in multiple countries, which explains why it took him a decade to complete Lost Boys. There just aren’t that many editing suites in Finnish prisons, so he handed his footage and extensive notes over to co-director Sadri Cetinkaya and Venla Varha to form his rough, hand-captured footage into an actual film.
But his complicity is the only way he could possibly have made this film, like William S. Burroughs was the only writer that could have penned Junkie, or Jack Black (not that one) be able to spew out seminal and feral hobo narrative You Can’t Win. Moreover, there is discipline to his junkie insight, assembled from countless hours of video. The old story about Apocalypse Now is that the chaotic, drug-ravaged shoot only came together in the edit, which rings true for Lost Boys too. That’s no coincidence, because Neuvonen’s assembly of years of POV footage feels like a strung-out kin to Coppola’s masterpiece, with the director’s low, cracked narration (heavy shades of Martin Sheen’s depressed snarl) binding together the sometimes abstract content into a coherent narrative.
Neuvonen’s portrait of junkie colonialism is suffocating and nauseating, like a cockroach dying on a pile of shrimp in the night market. That immediacy coalesces into a brutal, visceral, often stomach-churning experience. It’s doubtful that any documentary since Dog Freel’s shot[up] on tour depiction of Al Jourgensen’s habit in Fix: The Ministry Movie has featured so many close-up shots of needles in arms and naked genitals. At points it ends up just boastful POV porn, as the director bangs his way through the sex workers of Phnom Penh. Yet there is surprising introspection, as Neuvonen tries to work out how and why his friend died – murder, accident, suicide – and whether he was personally responsible.
Lost Boys screens as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival running Aug. 5-25. Info and virtual passes at fantasiafestival.com.
This article appears in August 13 • 2021.
