Film in Pictures: Contempo Film Noir in Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere

Couple of days ago we showed you this still of Shannyn Sossamon, and now we’ve got the full synopsis and a batch of new images for Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere (Venice Film Festival Main Competition). Shot in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, the West End of London, Lago di Garda in Northern Italy, the ancient parts of Rome and Hellman’s own living room, reading from the film’s press kit, this promises to be a twisty, turny item with Sossamon’s character borrowing certain doppelganger-like features.

A determined young American filmmaker (Tygh Runyan) in Hollywood sets out to make a film based upon a “true” crime story involving an older North Carolina politico and his much younger staffer, who may or may not be his lover. Was she the victim of his $100 million dollar kickback scheme? Or was she the femme fatale who drove him down this path that led to the death of a decorated police officer and to their double suicide pact? These are the questions haunting the young filmmaker and his immersion in the mystery only deepens when, after turning down every major young actress in Hollywood, he casts an unknown (Shannyn Sossamon) to play the young woman at the heart of the story. She also turns out to be an unknown whose own personal tale is as murky as the yarn he’s trying to tell. And more than the heart of the story, she becomes much more to his own heart and to his quest to make “art” out of “truth.”