‘First Love, Last Rites’: Ordinary Folks on Bayou

Jesse Peretz’s “First Love, Last Rites” takes us into the Louisiana bayou country southwest of New Orleans. The setting is ravishing visually, with watery vistas and swamps with trees dripping with Spanish moss. The small fishing community in which its story takes place, however, is remarkably nondescript; it’s a place where ordinary people live ordinary lives.

Too ordinary. In his feature debut, Peretz, in adapting Ian McEwan’s short story, charts the course of a first love with a bemused sensitivity and displays a sure instinct for the cinematic. But the plain truth is that his young lovers aren’t very interesting, despite the adroit casting of Natasha Gregson Wagner and Giovanni Ribisi. Ribisi’s Joey has ended up in the community for the summer and soon meets and becomes involved with Wagner’s local girl Sissel.

Sissel is a desirable, fully mature young woman and knows it, whereas Joey is still pretty much a gangling kid, even though they both seem to be 20ish. He soon falls hard for Sissel, who is more detached, insisting on remaining her own woman. Their romance awakens Sissel to her power over men. You sense that she instinctively knows that Joey is only the beginning for her whereas he envisions spending the rest of his life with her.

Sissel and Joey are very real, as is the course of their relationship. But there’s not a lot to them. They have little education, few interests, no apparent goals. Little is going on around them or, it would seem, inside their heads, although Joey goes through much emotional churning.

You have to admire Peretz for resisting making more of them than they are simply to make a more entertaining film. Yet he needed to discover and reveal more about them that would involve us more deeply than they do. The only other major character is Sissel’s father, played by Robert John Burke as a manic, none-too-swift guy given to crazy schemes and irritating his estranged wife by driving his vintage convertible back and forth on her tract house driveway, accompanied by loud Chinese music.

For such a determinedly independent production, “First Love, Last Rites” shares in common with countless Hollywood pictures a vagueness about finances. You wonder what its people live on, yet nobody is working much or worrying that they don’t. (It would seem that when Sissel takes a job in a sugar factory it’s more out of boredom than anything else.)

The film, which is very well-shaped and controlled, benefits from Nathan Larson and Craig Wedron’s vital score and from Tom Richmond’s superb cinematography with its muted palette. Peretz displays a fine sense of tempo and structure and reveals a subtle, understated sensibility. “First Love, Last Rites” is of more interest for what it portends for Peretz’s future as a filmmaker than for what it actually delivers.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes considerable lovemaking, some nudity, language.

‘First Love, Last Rites’

Natasha Gregson Wagner: Sissel

Giovanni Ribisi: Joey

Robert John Burke: Henry

Jeannetta Arnette: Sissel’s Mom

A Strand Releasing presentation. Director Jesse Peretz. Producers Scott Macaulay, Robin O’Hara, Herbert Beigel. Executive producers Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Amanda Temple. Screenplay by David Ryan. Adapted by Ryan and Peretz from a story by Ian McEwan. Cinematographer Tom Richmond. Editor James Lyons. Costumes Yasmine Abraham. Music Nathan Larson and Craig Wedron. Production designer Dan Estabrook. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

* At selected theaters in Los Angeles and Orange counties.