Vision Quest

A sports film set in Washington state. Louden is in his last year of school. He is on the wrestling team and he is good. He makes a decision. There is an undefeated wrestler in the region and he wants to face him. Shute wrestles two weight classes below. Louden has to come down. He has to cut close to ten kilos. That means months of starving. From there the film is a story about losing weight. Sweat rooms, running, scales, bleeding and blacking out. Nobody understands it. His father objects, his coach thinks it dangerous, his friends ask why. Louden has no answer. He simply wants to do it. At the same time a woman comes to the house. Carla stays a while after her car breaks down. She is in her twenties. Older than him, and on her way somewhere. Something forms between them. What the narrative is interested in is not wrestling but proof: its idea is that the boy is trying to prove something to himself and that everyone he meets tells him it is unnecessary. An old man who works at a hotel makes a speech, and that speech states the film's idea plainly. The final bout is short. The narrative does not turn the result into a scene of triumph. The source is Terry Davis's novel. The music comes from the pop charts of the period and the film uses it heavily. Madonna appears on stage in a bar and sings; she was at the start of her career and this is one of her first film appearances. Matthew Modine, Linda Fiorentino, Ronny Cox, Michael Schoeffling and Daphne Zuniga are in the cast. Harold Becker directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1980s American high school films and sports narratives. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the narrative opens the health question of cutting weight and then closes it as heroism.