Paranoid Park (2007) by Gus Van Sant; Ratings: 4 & 1/2 in 5

"Dude, I don’t think I’m ready for Paranoid Park.”

“Hey, nobody is ever ready for Paranoid Park.”
                                        -----PARANOID PARK, GUS VAN SANT.

If you are expecting plot, suspense, story, conclusion, analysis, curious dialogues, don’t ever watch Gus Van Sant. He eschews all narrative conventions that he thinks are redundant, and what remains is purely, dazzlingly cinematic. His recent movies ( “Gerry”, “Elephant”, “Last Days”, “Paranoid Park”) are pure cinemas, and cinemas that are unmistakably his own. America has seldom seen such a strong auteur film-maker in recent years, and it pays far less attention to his genius than what he deserves. Van Sant started as a major member of the Queer Cinema movement (“Drugstore Cowboys”, “My Private Idaho”), then had a brief and eventful foray at Hollywood, where he made one Oscar-winning film (Good Will Hunting), and managed to make an absolute shot-by-shot, angle-by-angle remake of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” that proved to be the most mordant joke anyone ever cracked at Hollywood’s practice of making remakes and so-called ‘adaptations’ (the studios and majority of the critics did not enjoy the joke at all; people with power are exceptionally touchy about their skins!). Predictably, Hollywood threw him out after that. What followed is the second phase of Van Sant’s film-making; taking a little something-s from a diverse array of influences ranging from Tarkovsky, Belá Tarr to Cinema Verité documentaries, he created a style permanently his own. His ‘Death’ trilogy (“Gerry”, “Elephant”, and “Last Days”) has been one of the major cinematic discoveries of the last decade. “Elephant” won the Palm d’Or at Cannes [for details, check the review of this film published on this blog]. “Paranoid Park”, written (loosely based on a novel), directed and edited by Gus Van Sant, is a companion-piece to “Elephant”. It has won the 60th Anniversary Award at 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Although not as overwhelming and major as “Elephant”, it is still a small, beautiful, and original film that almost forces its viewers into a hallucinating, tranquil trance.

“Paranoid Park” is visually stunning, and I am understating here. It has the barest minimum of a plot: in Portland, Oregon, a teenager, called Alex (played by Gabe Nevins), goes to a skateboard park called the “Paranoid Park” (which is the Mecca for all Portland skateboarders), meets a freight-train-hopping guy called ‘scratch’, takes a ride on a freight train, when a security guard intervenes, he hits him with the skateboard, which causes the guard to fall under a train and die. Coming from a troubled family where the parents are in the process of getting divorced, Alex faces his first existential problem: guilt. The film only studies that and nothing else (Police does come to know about it, but they never zero in on Alex; in fact, the police angle is only perfunctory). No one gets caught; no one comes to know about it, no catharsis, no conclusion. It uses real-life non-actor teenagers who really, for once, sound like teenagers. Dialogues are sparse: cinema talks through images. Alex goes through his voice-overs as if he is reading his creative writing project in front of a classroom, while he is actually expressing the innermost crisis of his life. Nowadays, many films use hop-scotch chronology and fragmented narratives just as a trendy fashion style (the Bourne films and “Crash” would be a good example); it makes the film look better than what it truly is. “Paranoid Park” is not one of those; its fragmentary and elliptical nature is the direct consequence of how Alex deals with his inner crisis: he sways and wavers, like the motion of a skateboard, facts and impressions come out in bits and pieces. Reminiscent of “Elephant”, Alex walks down the school corridors that look severely antiseptic with a lost look as if he is under a coral reef scuba-diving. In fact, the whole teenage experience in Van Sant’s films has the feel of an underwater life, ---- an original ambience of alienation I find subtle and breathtaking. Van Sant has a sympathy for these young men that transcends the boundaries of the teenager archetype, and gets him across the very dangerous waters (infested with squirming archetypes) of the teen-flick genre. He finds an unconceivable amount of depth within teenage boys who still wear elastic friendship bands!
Skateboarding is the major metaphor here; it is the teenage mimicry of the adult world. Throughout the film, we see various skateboarders performing tricks in front of an 8mm handheld camera: they are practicing the next, big steps. To the urban, cosmopolitan teenagers of Van Sant’s movie, adulthood is ‘high’, it’s ‘cool, dude’, its ‘paranoia’. There is an amazing sequence in the film that frames this with quaint humor. A police officer (played by Daniel Liu) talks to the skateboarders of Alex’s school to learn about the ‘skateboard’ community that hangs around the Paranoid Park. The officer repeatedly refers to it as the ‘skateboard park’ while the students rectify his mistake: it is “PARANOID PARK”. What looks like skateboarding to adults is in reality a paranoid ritual, the hyper-active, hyper-alienated oscillating mimicry of the futility of life. No one is ready for the Paranoid Park; life always shocks. The cool alienation of the teenagers is so intense and profound it might give you a chill. Van Sant’s world-view closely resembles that of Jean Baudrillard (at least I think so); he is one of the very, very few film-makers who can really feel the pulse of the post-modern situation. “Paranoid Park” is a landscape of the post-modern teenage alienation.

The film can be read in other ways as well; it alludes to the train-hopping generations of the old Great Depression days, it discourses on certain sexual politics. By being slow and introspective and by avoiding conclusive scenarios, it leaves a discursive space for the viewers, a time-&-space that enables us to think freely. There are many viewers who prefer a definitive and conclusive story instead; they should not feel proud of that, -- aesthetic backwardness, gullibility and pseudo-innocence are not virtues.

However, this is neither a prefect film nor a great one. There are hitches; the gory train accident scenario looks out of place, as if someone is trying to insert a Takashi Miike film within one by Ingmar Bergman. Despite its non-cathartic staunchness, the end effect feels a little too small, little too tame. It does not pack a hefty punch the way “Elephant” did. But then, small things have their own intrinsic values we often tend to neglect: Beethoven’s Sixth is by no means inferior to his Fifth or Ninth. However, when I compare it to such ‘small’ films as Kieslowski’s “A Short Story about Love”, it falls just a little short, feels just a little shallow. Then again, films like “A Short Story….” happens once in a blue moon; it is futile to expect such miracle every time. I am detecting these faults only because it comes from the hands of the man who made “Elephant”. For anyone else of lesser caliber, it would have been a resounding victory.
The music of the film is interesting, to say the least. Unlike the ascetic and minimalist score of his previous “Elephant”, here he throws the whole kitchen sink at us; he uses Beethoven symphonies, oldies, bluegrass, country, acid-rock, and an abundant amount of musical quotations from Fellini’s films (mainly from Nino Rota’s score for “Juliet of Spirits” and “Amarcord”). At first, I was shaking my head, “no, no, this is all wrong”. Yet, the music was simultaneously disturbing and arresting my attention. It took me a while to make sense of it: Van Sant is using it as a discordant note. He places a part from Beethoven’s Ninth right after playing a country song, and just about when you are on the verge of recognizing the symphony, he abruptly cuts it off. Watch that beautiful sequence where we see Jennifer (played by Taylor Momsen), Alex’s girlfriend, is being ditched by Alex; we see a close-up of Jennifer talking incessantly while the only thing we hear is a beautiful, French-like nocturne by Nino Rota. The satire is devastating; you have to see it to believe it. There are those quintessential Van Sant moments that are so profound yet completely inscrutable; watch Alex’s younger brother recount a part of a film verbatim to his brother. Watch the slow-motion shot where all the skater kids of the school stride down the hallway like a slightly unhinged, teen-age “Wild Bunch”. Watch the mesmerizing sequence shot with an 8mm handheld where the skaters skateboard at Paranoid Park. Watch the title scene: it has no direct link with the narrative, yet it is what the film is. If you can make sense of the first shot after watching the film, then, don’t worry, you have got the feel.

I will rate this 4 & 1/2 because it is a Gus Van Sant’s film. I am giving this a 4 & ½ because 5 is for “Elephant”.

2007 has been a great year for teen movies. With such commercial efforts like “Juno”, offbeat-s like “Tracy Fragments” (I’ll review this film next), and with such mature films like “Paranoid Park”, the teenagers are finally getting a depth they deserve in films. Who knows, may be we are watching the birth of a new genre here, the “Neo-Teen-Drama” genre. There is a possibility that the cosmopolitan hyperreality of our postmodern times is seeking its expression through these films. Films like “Paranoid Park” are ultimately significant due to this final reason, because there is no time more important than the present.
                                                                        BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI

GREAT FILMS: ELEPHANT(2003) BY GUS VAN SANT (WINNER OF PALME D'OR,CANNES)

When the tone poem “Don Juan” by Richard Strauss, the great German composer and not a relative of Johann Strauss, was premiered in the year 1889, half the hall cheered and the other half booed. This told Richard that he has found his own musical voice, and he wrote:

“I now comfort myself with the knowledge that I am on the road I want to take, fully conscious that there never has been an artist not considered crazy by thousands of his fellow men.”

After the controversy about his 2003 film “Elephant”, director Gus van Sant could have proudly reiterated that. This is a great film, this is an extremely unlikely film to be made in Hollywood, and it is a miracle that the film was ever completed. It unanimously won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; Todd McCarthy of Variety magazine said that the film is “pointless at best and irresponsible at worst”. Are you wondering why there was such bipolar disorder among critics? I will tell you. But before that, let me tell you one thing. If you want to know whether a film is really good or not, go to the Europeans (not the British), and stop believing the Americans (especially the critics). They are genetically impotent of anything higher than good mediocracy.

First, I must tell you how I discovered this film. It was 2:30 AM of stark, cold night; I was deep into a movie binge. Then I decided to go to bed. Before that, I switched the TV on. It was HBO. The next movie, they showed, was something named “Elephant”. I liked the cinematography from the trailer, so decided to go through the first few minutes, and then go to bed. I did not sleep that night. I was feeling like a new-born.

I am not kidding. That’s what a good film, especially when it comes as a surprise, can do to you. From then on, this film became a personal obsession for me. For the record, in last two years, HBO showed this film only once. Unfortunately for HBO, they sponsored this independent film. Well, enough of oblique talk, lets come straight to the point. Who is this Gus van Sant? All of you have seen at least one of his films: “Good Will Hunting” (1997). Do you think that is a great film? It is not, it is just a very good Hollywood film. You might have seen another of his movies at Z MGM of past: “To Die For”, with Nicole Kidman starring as a murderously ambitious weather-girl manipulating her husband and an unstable boy (Joaquin Phoenix) obsessed with her. Gus van Sant is primarily an independent moviemaker who made it big in Hollywood with “Good Will Hunting”. He made only two mainstream movies after that; he understood the limitation of Hollywood factories to be debilitating for a truly original director, and he left. Here is what he said, “I came to realize since I had no need to make a lot of money, I should make films I find interesting, regardless of their outcome and audience.” Gus van Sant came into his own with his later works, especially in his “Death Trilogy”. Elephant is the second film of the trilogy. What is “Elephant” all about? It is about a massive shootout inside a school, an event strongly resembling the Columbine School Massacre. The reason people got angry about this film is because it is only about the shootout; in other words, it does not provide any reason, background, or cure, it just states what it wants to state. It does not let you close the case shut, and move on after the movie. It keeps the problem open. The difference between “Elephant” and other inane “issue-based” “movies with messages” is the difference between polemic and sincere thought. The difference between political parties and Karl Marx. Between “kitsch” and “sublime”. The greatest thing about this film is that it refuses to essentialize anything and problematizes everything. It is unbearable for the American media to see someone thwart the “great” reasons and cures they have formulated and transmitted everywhere for years, unbearable to see someone denuding the mystic glamour of its favorite events, events that they cover inch-by-inch, second-by-second, deaths they have shown in all their glory; it is unbearable for them to see themselves naked and waxed like a freak. In its after-effect, “Elephant” is a destroyer of myths and myth-builders. If you conform to stupid ideas such as “Films Propagate Violence among Kids”, “Consumerism Kills You Spiritually”, “Charity will One Day Make Every Poor Rich” etc, then you will not like this film. But in that case, you should not like me. Because, if you follow a logical sequence starting from those quoted presumptions, you will end up at the statement “We Are Worse than Baboons”. In case you accept those oft-repeated statements I have put under quotation marks, please accept this as a truth. It might end up being self-reflexive.

Now, for the remnant, are you quizzing yourself why this film is named “Elephant”? There is no reference to any sort of an elephant in the film (other than a pencil drawing in one of the protagonist’s room). There have been many interpretations of the name of the film; some say it is a tribute to a BBC documentary made by Alan Clarke of the same name; I prefer a different explanation. The title is an allusion to the Indian fable “Blinds Watching an Elephant”. Most of you know the tale; blinds cannot gasp the reality of an elephant wholly. What Gus van Sant means here is that we cannot understand the enormity of a homicide only through analytical reason; whenever we try to interpret, we distort the image by essentializing it. “Elephant”, on the other hand, deconstructs the event [in the strictest Derridian sense. You have to see the film to realize how closely it reads the events]. In that respect, this film is truly post-modern (not in an “ism” sense, but as a time&space-frame), and a close relative to films like “No Country for Old Men”.

“Elephant” is one of the most poetic films I have ever seen. It is made of extremely long tracking shots filmed through SteadyCams. Harris Savides’ cinematography astounds even after watching it thrice. The film follows several students throughout the huge school on an ordinary day that ends up being the date of the shootout. There is violence in the film, but they are not violent. Gus van Sant strips the killings of their glamour, effect, convention and polemic by making them anemic; he shows what they really are: repetitions of video games, simulation of a simulation. The deaths in this film are “cool”, or even “cold” in a Marshall-McLuhan-Jean-Baudrillard sense. The film does not try to analyze its characters; instead it respects their privacy (when a student enters the classroom, the camera remains outside). One of the shooters, Alex (played by Alex Frost) is an accomplished pianist. He played Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” in a long sequence, and that music becomes the theme (the score is actually played by the actor Alex Frost). It is one of the most serene and memorable use of Classical music in a film I have ever heard. The cinematography in reminiscent of the great Hungarian director Belá Tarr, and in its empty uneventful nature, it reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni at his best. Also, one can say that such film-making signals a return of Cinema verité.

The film was shot in an improvisational way. There were no dialogs in the script; they were made up by the actors ad lib. It was an inspired choice, as it helps the film to avoid “meaningful”, cliché films. Everyone looks so real that it might scare you. In fact, all the actors in the film are amateurs; many of them were from the school where the film was shot.

Some people complained about some essentialisation in the film: the shooters watch a Nazi propaganda film; they play a video game where they shoot people. That disturbed me for some time: are they not trying to propagate a “message”? But then I realized where my, and other critics’, problem lies. We forget the fact that Americans are the largest consumer of Nazi propaganda products. We forget the fact that it is natural for a teenager to play a shooting game on his laptop (I do the same on my desktop). Film directors are not responsible for our thoughts, responsible for the conventions we unconsciously follow. It is a major lesion we often tend to forget.

Roger Ebert once wrote a very significant thing about Hollywood: “when it comes to tragedies, Hollywood is in the catharsis business”. It is not even a truth, it is troth. They are into other monkey businesses too. Hollywood is the pinnacle of professional, segmented film-making; but to be a true Auteur, you have to stop formalizing films. And great films only come from true auteurs and that too once in a while [that does not mean there are no auteurs in Hollywood]. This is one of those films. If you ever felt love towards the medium called film, you should watch this movie. It is a film that dwells at a different level of film-making altogether, a level rarely reached by filmmakers, rarely enjoyed by cineastes. See whether you like it or not.

N.B:--This film was produced by Diane Keaton. I am a big fan of her work, and I think producing this film should be counted among one of the greatest things she has ever done. Without a free leash, and without the producers not “peeing” [a word used by Gus van Sant himself] on the film, such movies cannot be made.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI