AllMovie

Made for about 2,000 dollars, Last Chants for a Slow Dance introduced Jon Jost's unique ability to make compelling, stylistically innovative feature films on miniscule budgets. The opening scene, a deftly edited series of long takes, establishes the protagonist's character (thanks to an obscenity-laced monologue by Tom Blair that's as funny as it is cruel) while making such brilliant use of offscreen space that film professors often use it to illustrate the very concept. Though nothing else in the film quite measures up to this bravura sequence, it remains compelling throughout due in large part to Blair's corrosive performance in the lead role. His Tom is utterly repugnant. He punctuates his self-aggrandizing speeches with high-pitched mirthless cackles and treats almost everyone he meets with disdain or cruelty. It was a risky move on Jost's part to build his film around such an unsympathetic figure, but Tom's bad-boy charisma seduces the viewer as surely as it does the other characters, and the darkly crude sense of humor that director and star seem to share (and would show up full-flower in Jost's final American film, the scathing comedy Frameup) saves it from descending into unrelieved nastiness. The film has some rough edges. As he does in his later films, Jost shows a real sensitivity to the Western landscape, but many of the interior scenes, often shot with a jerky handheld camera, run long and fall flat. These clunkers, however, are outweighed by Jost's more ingenious flourishes, especially a time-lapse sequence during a one-night stand that creates a subtle, extended optical (and temporal) illusion while providing a respite from the restless energy of the rest of the film. Last Chants' unevenness and its combination of shoestring technical innovation and amateurish flaws, represent the development of a style that would become more assured as Jost's career progressed.