Mala Noche
First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Gus Van Sant. Cast: Tim Streeter, Doug Cooeyate, Ray Monge, Nyla McCarthy, Sam Downey. Screenplay: Gus Van Sant (based on the book by Walt Curtis). In Brief:
Shaggy, grainy photography and looseleaf shape capture the sincerity and tawdriness of desire. Punches above its weight.
VOR:④
Both a milestone of what became New Queer Cinema and a memento to places it too rarely went. A pivotal Van Sant movie and an outlier for him.
I just love the literally street-level POV of this genuinely independent production, which has the flavor of somebody's scrawly composition notebook at open mic or of an underground cassette being passed around a gangly yet intimate urban counterpublic. I think this was more or less the case, given that then-recent Portland arrivée Gus Van Sant (an upper-middle-class Kentuckian by birth), original story writer and longtime Portland staple Walt Curtis, cinematographer John Campbell, and several other majority-gay collaborators were still getting to know each other and figuring out certain aspects of the project as they went.
Mala Noche feels vibrantly, shaggily reflective of the process that gave rise to it, and the movie has a specific taste and smell, which is even rarer than a defined sound and look. It's not a high point in the rhetoric of how white citizens or white artists, even the economically precarious and otherwise minoritized, address themselves to undocumented migrants and the situation they're in. Casual jokes about not being or not calling immigration officers, hoping that an offer of temporary shelter might actually be a route to un-offered sexual gratification; that sort of thing. When you have to include a line for your white lead like, "It's not as though I thought Johnny was my property or I could press myself on him just because he needed the money and a place to stay," it's a signal that you know your audience has that exact impression of the politics at work. That said, Walt, the lead character isn't meant to be mature or at all well-educated about this topic, or all that wise in other ways, so it's a legit point of characterization not to clean up his psyche or his cheerfully colonial thought process for us. And truth be told, Mala Noche isn't nearly as othering or as insensitive as it might have been. It helps that Ray Monge and Doug Cooeyate, the non-professionals playing the Mexican migrants Pepper and Johnny (Monge a boxer who'd never acted, Cooeyate an indigenous, non-Hispanophone high school kid), have scrappy personalities and complex headspaces, which many filmmakers somehow find it hard to confer on characters like these.
Campbell's camera has its own spirit and personality as well, sitting comfortably alongside some of its peers in loosely contemporaneous black and white US indies (Erasehead, Born in Flames, Stranger than Paradise) without really resembling any of them. Nor does Mala Noche resemble stylistically in Van Sant's ensuing career, which it launched, even if there are topical and temperamental overlaps. It made sense when Good Will Hunting came out that everyone underscored what a directorial swerve that project marked for him, but if you set Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and My Own Private Idaho next to each other, it's kind of surprising we ever thought of Van Sant as having a stable aesthetic.
Histories of so-called New Queer Cinema (Idaho, Paris Is Burning, Poison, Swoon, Edward II, the Sadie Benning and Cheryl Dunye shorts, The Living End) continually elevate the 1990-92 years as its germination, just as histories of academic queer theory (Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Douglas Crimp) canonize the same period. Slight rewinds to the late 80s accommodate, as well they should, Tongues Untied and Looking for Langston (both 1989) into that legacy, while still casting the early and mid 80s as a time of comparatively staid, safe, "we're just like the rest of you" LGBTQ dramas for white middle-class audiences (Desert Hearts, Personal Best, Making Love). Mala Noche is one of those early-to-mid-80s movies, like Born in Flames or Buddies or Flaming Ears or Taxi zum Klo or I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, that is too often peripheralized in these popular or scholarly stories, and I wonder how those tales would change if we altered our rhetorical and historical parameters appropriately. I wrote a book loosely driven by this agenda and a huge number of people in queer media studies have stretched and complicated the simplified narratives I just rehearsed in plenty of ways. But there's still more work to do. Not just if Mala Noche were as famous as My Own Private Idaho but if Johnny and Pepper, not Walt, were taken as its emblematic figures and central propositions, a whole new vision opens up.
I also love that Van Sant now sees Mala Noche less as an avatar of impending queer cinema and more as a Dogme 95 movie avant la letter. Nothing, and certainly no film movement, exists in isolation. Grade:B+
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
