PARANOID PARK A-
USA France
(85 mi) 2007 d: Gus
van Sant
An impressionistic portrait of a moody, self-absorbed
teenage male who remains disinterested and aloof from just about every
connecting social fabric of society, not the least of which includes girls and
sex, absent parents who are separated and heading for divorce, a school that
offers little incentive, and a mall in town where kids meet that’s pretty much
just like any other mall, so instead he immerses himself in skateboard culture,
filled with other outsider kids who are as bored as he is with nothing better
to do. The sense of alienation in this
film is palpable and artistically expressed, from slowing down the speed of the
film as a character walks in slow motion through school hallways, but even more
through an inventive sound design that includes odd electronic sounds, like an
updated Antonioni RED DESERT (1964), and the unmistakable sounds of Fellini’s
musical nonpareil Nino Rota. Abstract to
the core, van Sant adapted Blake Nelson’s novel, reducing it to mere fragments
in a reconstructed kaleidoscope mosaic, while also directing and editing the
film. Shot in Portland, Oregon by Wong
Kar-wai stalwart Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, the opening shot of a
bridge at dusk is held steady as car lights zoom past like colorful laser beams
of light before providing a collage of grainy video imagery of skateboarders
moving in and out of view, like a darkened blur of moving shadows. The voice of Gabe Nevins as Alex reads a
voiceover letter in halting fashion, something he’s written in his notebook to
try to make sense of a situation he can’t comprehend.
Much of the film revolves around Alex’s face, youthful,
innocent, open like a book but completely unreadable, remaining detached throughout,
while the camera follows him wherever he goes, occasionally accompanied by his
internal thoughts from his notebook, but more often from a unique sound design
configured by Leslie Shatz, who has worked with van Sant since GOOD WILL
HUNTING (1997). Told out of sequence,
Alex is called out of class and questioned by a police detective who is
investigating a rail yard death near Paranoid Park, an undulating design of
rolling curves and rising walls underneath a highway overpass where adolescent
boys congregate with skateboards, a kind of free form improvisational
expression created in a grungy part of town by the kids themselves, described
by Alex as: “They’d built the Park
illegally, all by themselves. Train
hoppers, guitar punks, skate drunks, throwaway kids. No matter how bad your family life was, these
guys had it much worse.” Alex recalls
his whereabouts on a certain Saturday night to the detective with a natural high
school specificity, what food he ate, how it was prepared, how much it cost,
but due to his fractured state of mind, one suspects he is leaving something
out. We meet his high strung girl friend
Jennifer, Taylor Momsen, through a phone call where he’d rather hang out with
his buddy Jared (Jake Miller) than be with her, where even this partial glimpse
reveals plenty about the tangential state of their affairs. Later in the company of his buddies he can be
overheard calling her a drama queen. Little
if any emotion is ever expressed by the boys who all but dominate this film, as
Jennifer is a discardable part in his life while Macy, Lauren McKinney, who he
meets at Paranoid Park, is more of a tomboy who fits in as one of the
guys.
What happened that Saturday night is the key to the film, alluded
to frequently though not necessarily in any coherent order throughout the film,
as Alex gets separated from Jared and meets Macy and a few other guys at
Paranoid Park, including an older boy named Scratch (Scott Patrick Green) who
offers him a beer and a ride on a freight train. The idea of hopping a freight appeals to him
and despite what the filmmaker decides to show us, an accidental death bordering
on the surreal, it’s all ambiguously unclear what actually happened due to the
hazy state of Alex’s mind. Following
right on the heels of this sequence is another of Jennifer losing her virginity
to Alex at a party, where Alex couldn’t be less interested, but of course she’s
thrilled to run off and tell her girl friends.
Later, depicted like a scene from the silent film era as mouths move but
no words are heard, Alex breaks up with her in front of her cheerleader girl
friends dressed in uniform after school, seen standing out of focus in the
background, all told with the zany music of Nino Rota running through his mind. This second scene suggests more happened at
the first, but is being repressed due to the blunt emotional trauma, which is a
lot for one kid to endure alone. Both
were likely sexual encounters gone wrong. There’s a fascinating way to bring all this
together, as all the skateboarders in school are called in to see the
detective, where in a slow motion shot in the hallway, more keep being added to
the frame in a humorous montage of their scruffy, free spirited approach to
life. It becomes emblematic, like a
poster shot for the movie, as there’s something alluring yet completely under
the surface about the appeal Paranoid Park has on these disconnected young
boys. All captured in a poetic
reconfiguration, using sound, music, lightness and dark, van Sant keeps
devising new strategies to fascinate his audience with cinematic ideas and
thoughts whose narrative surface is barely there, yet whose haunting power and
influence lies within.
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