One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Monte Hellman's Road to Nowhere is exclusively showing on MUBI in the United States starting June 13, 2021.
Road to Nowhere is both the title of Hellman’s final work and the film within the film. It’s first seen as a handwritten scrawl on a DVD-R popped into a laptop tray. The camera pushes into the computer screen, Max Renn-like, and the image of a woman doing her nails expands into the full frame. “Velma was always my window into the story” says the voice of Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan), the in-film director and surrogate obsessive (both MH). Mitchell is driven to his own unraveling, like Hellman’s Willet Gashade and The Driver before him, by the single-minded pursuit of an obsession. Here, it’s the cinema itself and the image of Velma Duran (Shannyn Sossamon): a missing woman played by an actress named Laurel who might be the real Velma on the lamb. Mitchell ignores all sign posts pointing to his undoing and courts the complete collapsing of reality into cinema. It’s a world that he authors but one that he cannot control, pieced together from movie ephemera and “other people’s dreams.” Three times Mitchell and Laurel/Velma watch a movie on a small screen. Always a classic about death or doubles. The last of these screenings is Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Mitchell stares transfixed by the digital image of Antonius Block challenging Death. In Mitchell’s face is an intensity; a perverse yearning for a dream world kept alive through digital technology. Behind him, Laurel/Velma’s expression is inscrutable, obscured by shadow. The shot is an expressionistic image; it’s Mitchell’s real life and his dream simultaneously. It’s both Laurel the actress and Velma the character. She is unknowable to him, an element of his cinematic frame to be composed. The shot is located in the spaces between classical Hollywood and its self-aware deconstruction, Hellman’s preferred location where he transforms the metatextual into ruminations on mortality. Hellman’s characters seek a freedom of movement, but are constrained by their all-consuming drives. Here, classic cinema is an echo of the past, a death mask leaving traces of what once was while the future unfurls around it. But Hellman is not nostalgic. For both Mitchell and Hellman, the intimate mobility of the digital camera reinvents cinema again, but this reinvention is an ouroboros. Hellman’s swan song shares this mentality with two other masterpieces of 21st century digital cinema, both of which take up Hollywood as their subject. Like Inland Empire before it and Maps to the Stars after, Road to Nowhere expresses the haunting power of dreams and the purgatorial nightmare that is not its opposite, but its lining.