CAST:
River Phoenix,
Keanu Reeves,
James Russo,
William Richert

SCRIPT:
Gus Van Sant

PHOTOGRAPHY:
John J. Campbell,
Eric Alan Edwards

MUSIC:
Bill Stafford

EDITING:
Curtiss Clayton

Synopsis:

Mike Waters is a young prostitute who suffers from narcolepsy, a sudden falling asleep. He is picked up from his favorite street spot to meet clients in Seattle by a rich older woman and taken to her lavish home, where there are already two other male prostitutes, one of whom is Mike's friend Scott Favor, the son of the mayor of Portland. While preparing for sex with the girl, Mike has another narcoleptic episode, and when he wakes up, he realizes that he is with Scott in Portland. There, they reconnect with Bob Pigeon, a middle-aged mentor to a group of street youths engaged in prostitution, to whom Scott reveals that when he turns 21, he will inherit his father's fortune and stop pimping. In the meantime, Mike feels a great longing for his mother, and he and Scott set off on a trip to Idaho, where Mike's older brother lives, who could tell him where their mother is now...

After the great success of the previous independent production Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant received the trust of the then leading independent studio New Line and the budget with which he could finally realize his coveted project of adapting Shakespeare's plays Henry IV and Henry V, in such a way as to transfer them to a modern time and milieu. of male prostitutes with a dominantly homosexual orientation, and the film was inspired by the novel City of Night (1963) by cult gay writer John Rechy, as well as Van Sant's own experience of friendship with male prostitutes in the late 1980s. As in Drugstore Cowboy, the emphasis is again on the motif of a dysfunctional family, but also the longing for the creation of an informal but emotionally connected community (the same theme will be at the center of meaning of the authors of the next film Blues Cowgirls). At that time, queer topics were still taboo, and My Own Idaho immediately became a classic of the movement called New Queer Cinema, of which Van Sant was one of the key authors (along with My Private Idaho and Blues Cowgirls, Van Sant's feature film also belongs to the movement debut Mala Noche from 1985). The film premiered in the main program of Venice's Mostra, where River Phoenix won the Volpi Cup for best actor, and Phoenix also won the leading American independent award, Independent Spirit, as well as Van Santos for best screenplay. My Own Idaho was met with critical acclaim, particularly praising the brilliant performances of Phoenix and Keanu Reeves; the latter also appeared in Kathryn Bigelow's hit Hell's Wave in the same year, where his partner was Patrick Swayze, in a relationship of characters implicitly imbued with homoerotic tones, and those two roles launched him among the big stars of the nineties.

color, 104'