The Best of Youth [Part A]
This year sees the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals parent a whole family of youth-orientated movies, from the angst-idol of James Dean, to the torment of Mysterious Skin. In Part A, TIM WONG raided the programme to see what else he could find.
» Part A | [Part B]
IF CHILDHOOD was a reoccurring theme in 2004 – characterised by the wide-eyed yonder of endless summers, abandoned siblings and a Miyazaki triptych – then it's hardly surprising a year on that things seem older and more angst-ridden. This year, the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals will unleash a programme as diverse and copious as ever, invoked with considerable allusions to the growing pains of impending adulthood. The films in question here present a world on the verge of becoming the oyster it always threatened to; for the youth of these films, it means the opposite sex, the breaking of rules, the responsibility of life, the burden of parents.
As caustic rebels in this mould go, James Dean was a defiant one. His abrupt screen legend spanned a mere three pictures, but unlike Marlon Brando, who grew to be old and bloated and just a little bit crazy, Dean's premature death at the age of 24 meant he remained eternally youthful to all those consumed by his brilliance. Two of those films – East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause (along with Giant, was released after Dean's death) – project in their original big screen CinemaScope format, and as dated as they might seem, these tempestuous Hollywood classics bottle the thunderbolt of youth like no other.
It's fitting then that 50 years on, James Dean in cahoots with Elia Kazan and Nicolas Ray can provide us with a reference point – if not template – for some of the festival's more current reflections on youth. The fire of rebellion, for instance, burns bright in The Edukators: a film that gives the Adbuster generation a capitalist-reaming workout. Surveying the housebreaking antics of a couple of neo-Situationists and – in a dilemma you'll find above – the girl wedged in between, it's a subversive activist flick that in both reviving and lamenting the bygone delinquency of 60's radicalism, may just spank the apathy out of all of us (for the duration of the film, anyway).
That other flaming desire, young love, tenders the seasonal heat of My Summer of Love: one of those giddy sunbaked movie flings buried in the crush of two teenage girls who, in the shadow of adults who think they know better, fall madly for one another. Their infatuation is the stuff of innocent, ultimately evanescent affection, but in the spirit of youthful abandon manages to coax forth impulsive declarations of everlasting love – the sort of reckless of-the-moment spontaneity once reserved for a scolding cheek-to-cheek close-up of James Dean and Natalie Wood.
In Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, abandon is much harder to come by, even if occasional glimmers do manage to shine through the adolescent cracks of his homebrewed autobiography: a distraught, emotionally wounded memoir that nevertheless preserves the fever and resilience of the young the hungry. The film of his life (so far) – famously conceived with iMovie, $218 and a boxful of recorded memories – feels at times like an exorcism, if not an open therapy session for which viewers will either come to be engrossed in, or straight-jacketed by. But it's the first moving pictures of Caouette at age 11, camped-up and reciting some crazed Woman Under The Influence-like monologue, that sets the scene for his infectious, ultimately cathartic obsession with the movies (and indeed, escapism) in the face of mental illness, coming out. and a generally tormented upbringing.
Elsewhere, you'll find the best and worst of youth trafficked with a certain ordained symmetry throughout the programme. Just as Caouette's formative years rear their ugly head in Tarnation, Gregg Araki's Doom Generation of estranged kids-in-limbo move slowly, but surely towards confronting their own suitably repressed past in Mysterious Skin. The skeletons that transpire (specifically, five horrible hours) are the kind that should be locked away for good, but in following the lead of Caouette's warts 'n all purge, Araki knows that if his lost boys are ever to make sense of their troubled young lives, they (and us) need to be taken to that dark, inconceivable place where bad things once happened.
On the flipside, the organic freedom of being unsupervised in Duck Season is said to charm anyone who's ever been 14, bored and just a little bit curious. The film's premise of a day-in-the-life of two boys left to their own devices sounds a lot like an apartment fairground of mischief and ignorant bliss, but also one that's eventually going to have to make way for life's mainstream. This pre-coming of age bounces aptly off the late suburban teen anguish of growing up in Thumbsucker, or in a less obvious way, Howl's Moving Castle. Hayao Miyazaki's films generally have nothing to say in way of the real world, but in a fundamental sense, it's the great animator's headstrong positioning of plucky teen heroines at the forefront of Much Bigger Things that not only perfectly nutshells what is good about youth, but for those of us lost in the magic, what it feels like to be young again. >>
» Part A | [Part B]
» Part A | [Part B]
IF CHILDHOOD was a reoccurring theme in 2004 – characterised by the wide-eyed yonder of endless summers, abandoned siblings and a Miyazaki triptych – then it's hardly surprising a year on that things seem older and more angst-ridden. This year, the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals will unleash a programme as diverse and copious as ever, invoked with considerable allusions to the growing pains of impending adulthood. The films in question here present a world on the verge of becoming the oyster it always threatened to; for the youth of these films, it means the opposite sex, the breaking of rules, the responsibility of life, the burden of parents.
As caustic rebels in this mould go, James Dean was a defiant one. His abrupt screen legend spanned a mere three pictures, but unlike Marlon Brando, who grew to be old and bloated and just a little bit crazy, Dean's premature death at the age of 24 meant he remained eternally youthful to all those consumed by his brilliance. Two of those films – East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause (along with Giant, was released after Dean's death) – project in their original big screen CinemaScope format, and as dated as they might seem, these tempestuous Hollywood classics bottle the thunderbolt of youth like no other.
It's fitting then that 50 years on, James Dean in cahoots with Elia Kazan and Nicolas Ray can provide us with a reference point – if not template – for some of the festival's more current reflections on youth. The fire of rebellion, for instance, burns bright in The Edukators: a film that gives the Adbuster generation a capitalist-reaming workout. Surveying the housebreaking antics of a couple of neo-Situationists and – in a dilemma you'll find above – the girl wedged in between, it's a subversive activist flick that in both reviving and lamenting the bygone delinquency of 60's radicalism, may just spank the apathy out of all of us (for the duration of the film, anyway).
That other flaming desire, young love, tenders the seasonal heat of My Summer of Love: one of those giddy sunbaked movie flings buried in the crush of two teenage girls who, in the shadow of adults who think they know better, fall madly for one another. Their infatuation is the stuff of innocent, ultimately evanescent affection, but in the spirit of youthful abandon manages to coax forth impulsive declarations of everlasting love – the sort of reckless of-the-moment spontaneity once reserved for a scolding cheek-to-cheek close-up of James Dean and Natalie Wood.
In Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, abandon is much harder to come by, even if occasional glimmers do manage to shine through the adolescent cracks of his homebrewed autobiography: a distraught, emotionally wounded memoir that nevertheless preserves the fever and resilience of the young the hungry. The film of his life (so far) – famously conceived with iMovie, $218 and a boxful of recorded memories – feels at times like an exorcism, if not an open therapy session for which viewers will either come to be engrossed in, or straight-jacketed by. But it's the first moving pictures of Caouette at age 11, camped-up and reciting some crazed Woman Under The Influence-like monologue, that sets the scene for his infectious, ultimately cathartic obsession with the movies (and indeed, escapism) in the face of mental illness, coming out. and a generally tormented upbringing.
Elsewhere, you'll find the best and worst of youth trafficked with a certain ordained symmetry throughout the programme. Just as Caouette's formative years rear their ugly head in Tarnation, Gregg Araki's Doom Generation of estranged kids-in-limbo move slowly, but surely towards confronting their own suitably repressed past in Mysterious Skin. The skeletons that transpire (specifically, five horrible hours) are the kind that should be locked away for good, but in following the lead of Caouette's warts 'n all purge, Araki knows that if his lost boys are ever to make sense of their troubled young lives, they (and us) need to be taken to that dark, inconceivable place where bad things once happened.
On the flipside, the organic freedom of being unsupervised in Duck Season is said to charm anyone who's ever been 14, bored and just a little bit curious. The film's premise of a day-in-the-life of two boys left to their own devices sounds a lot like an apartment fairground of mischief and ignorant bliss, but also one that's eventually going to have to make way for life's mainstream. This pre-coming of age bounces aptly off the late suburban teen anguish of growing up in Thumbsucker, or in a less obvious way, Howl's Moving Castle. Hayao Miyazaki's films generally have nothing to say in way of the real world, but in a fundamental sense, it's the great animator's headstrong positioning of plucky teen heroines at the forefront of Much Bigger Things that not only perfectly nutshells what is good about youth, but for those of us lost in the magic, what it feels like to be young again. >>
» Part A | [Part B]
The Edge of Heaven: Raw and urgent as a bullet to the jugular. Head-On's Fatih Akin plumbs Turkish-German family, politics, faith and love with uncompromising, edgy intensity. In striking contrast to Acid Reflux, aka Ashes of Time Redux, it does much more than look pretty.—Alexander Bisley
