Australia or Milk?

Two major film openings today...which film do you plan to see first: Australia or Milk? Double feature anyone?

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"Milk" Trailer

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Film of the Century

Although some will disagree, perhaps with vehemence, I feel secure in stating that Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park is the best film that has been produced in the 21st Century thus far. Van Sant’s astounding work is a study of textures and juxtaposition – a post-modern masterpiece that combines elements of my favorite filmmaking styles: the amateur acting and elegant precision of Robert Bresson, the melancholy fluidity of Andrei Tarkovsky’s existentially inquisitive camera, and the curious experimentation with image and sound that gave the New American Cinema movement a reinvigorated sense of the possibilities of cinema in the 1950s and 60s. In Paranoid Park, Van Sant, who wrote, directed, and edited the film, has crafted a film after my own cinematic heart.

Based on a novel of the same name by Blake Nelson, Paranoid Park follows Alex (brilliantly played by the non-professional actor Gabe Nevins), a wannabe skater punk as he juggles his parents divorce, losing his virginity, trying to fit in, and, most importantly, his manslaughtering of a security guard at a train yard. As the police investigation of the murder begins to target the skater community of “throwaway kids” after a skateboard is found in a river, covered with incriminating evidence, Alex’s guilt and anxiety begin to take over his every thought and his life begins to spiral into a state of moral confusion and fear that seems as gray as the ominous cloud that blankets the autumnal Oregon sky in the film’s opening shot.

From the aforementioned introductory shot of a Portland bridge being bared upon by the menacing weather, and throughout the entire film, Paranoid Park’s exploration of textural dialectics is in full force. The initial shot is in accelerated motion, cars zooming by on the bridge like smudges of light, and a selection from Nino Rota’s score for Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965) bops along with a levity that seems to mock the heaviness of the daunting cloud formation. Van Sant throws the somber image against the chipper tunes to elicit a mood that is immediately startling and confusing – and then he never stops experimenting with the unique tones achievable through such unusual juxtapositions.

The following shot finds Alex writing in a journal, in normal motion, the intimate sound of his pencil scratching along a page replacing the bright levity of Rota’s composition. After a short shot of Alex in a field, the film shifts to gorgeously fuzzy 8MM slow-motion footage of skateboarders gracefully sliding over the rounded concrete hills of the film’s titular skatepark, as ethereal French electronic music haunts the scene. After the ballet-like motion of the skating scenes comes an 8MM handheld tracking shot that quickly pushes in on Alex as he walks through a field, followed by a Tarkovskyesque smooth tracking shot from just behind Alex as he continues to walk, capping a truly astounding sequence of perfectly woven, yet disparate, sensual experiences.

The experimentation with complimentary and contradictory visual and sonic textures in Paranoid Park is incredibly fresh, and is no doubt as much a result of the presence of Wong Kar Wai’s (former) ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle, whose experiments with visual mutation and extremity made films like Chunking Express (1994) and Happy Together (1997) unforgettable, as it is of Van Sant’s innovative direction. Thematically, the varying textures reflect the malleable nature of teenage personality and the warring facets that define one’s identity during highly developmental periods in life – such as just after one has killed another person, lost his virginity, and experienced the beginning of his parents’ divorce. Alex is in quite a bit of turmoil (to say the least), and therefore, the film’s visual and aural characteristics are as well, approaching an almost Impressionistic mode of film practice.

Van Sant’s history as a student of avant-garde film at RISD, particularly Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, no doubt informs his use of slow-motion, focal manipulation, and mercurial shifts in lighting, even within a single shot – all of which enliven Paranoid Park with a pulsing courage. But equally as important as the influence of the avant-garde on Van Sant’s textural probing, is the influence of Robert Bresson on Van Sant’s use of amateur actors and his elliptical narrative structure – although its non-linearity certainly doesn’t come from Bresson. Paranoid Park carries a brand of Bressonian “realism” that results from Van Sant’s use of non-trained actors and his carefully elliptical and non-theatrical construction. Bresson’s presence is also felt in the film’s use of Alex as an awkwardly inflected narrator as he reads from journals, as is the case of the amateur leads in two of Bresson’s masterpieces: Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and Pickpocket (1959). It’s so relieving to see a filmmaker pursuing the same ends as Bresson, whose style is the most unsuccessfully explored of any of the classic masters.

Even beyond its formal brilliance, Paranoid Park is an immensely powerful film on an emotional and spiritual level. The film’s concerns are essentially existential, as expressed by Alex when he says to his friend Macy (Lauren McKinney), obliquely describing his experience with the death of the security guard, “I just feel like there’s something outside of normal life . . . There’s like different levels of stuff, and something happened to me.” The film’s poetic visual indulgence certainly establishes and accentuates the transcendental tone of its content, ingraining the film’s powerful, ineffable mood into that place that’s deeper than memory. I personally haven’t been able to get it out of my head, or my hands, or my lungs – it’s a very involving and absorbing film. I can’t quite describe how incredible Paranoid Park is, whether because of my inability as a writer or as a result of the film’s inexplicable power. The film can only speak for itself and every review I’ve read doesn’t quite do the film justice, so here's my conclusion: fuck writing and reading about it, JUST GO SEE IT.

by Brandon Colvin

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