By M
During the first 15 minutes of this movie I carefully noted down all the things that I thought were good, just because I wanted to collect enough material to argue against my friends who disliked this movie.
I find myself now with the movie behind me and thinking that it’s not the passion for disagreement which brings me to defend this movie, I actually think it’s very very good.
So here we go (in a rather disordered fashion).
There are two things that the director transmits very well, in my opnion, and these two things are interrelated: 1. the late-teenager necessity to perform obscenity in public and 2. the boredom one can feel in some parts of America when one is a teen.
On1: contrary to early teens, late-teens have experience and therefore the performance turns into a well-orchested choreography testing their own limits: how obscene can one be? This is particularly interesting because the teens withdraw from the representation a four dimensional pleasure: the pleasure of narration, the pleasure of representing the virtuality of pleasure, the remembrance of a lived pleasure and the possibility of finding an essence of self through that pleasure, i.e. deciding what one is going to do in the mid-term future.
The director explores all possible dimensions of representation and its impacts on reality: representing having sex with another girl suddenly turns into having sex with her. Indeed, the representation allows to test the limits and leads to crossing them.
The same goes for the first robbery. It’s interesting to see how the director manages to capture the excitement of the girls: they get excited under the rain, and then go rob, as if everything (including the imaginary) was the realm of sensual experience. After the robbery, they yell as the wind messes with their hair, there is a fusion between them and the background in a way that puts the sensual experience and the elements provoking the experience in the same category and without frontiers. As Franco very well explains later, “it’s time to experiment”.
The cinematographic expression of this is just right: close-ups of nudes, synthetic music, coloured ligths on the one hand, and on the other hand straight lines (the buildings, the trees, the surfaces of pavements, the surface of the swimming-pool water, the surface of the white piano).
The scene of the first robbery is itself a masterpiece: we stay in the car and see from the car every detail of it, through the windows, as if the film of the robbery was being unfolded in front of us. The choice of staying with one character instead of following the movement of action, together with the dance music that orchestrates the movement we are following, i.e. the movement of the car, are excellent choices. The staging of the robbery later, once in Florida, for their friends, it’s fantastic. The images we see when they narrate in Florida are those of the characters’ memories.
I am very picky with extreme close-ups and camera on the shoulder, but here it works well: it allows us to see what is interesting about these girls, that they still have kids’ naiveté, even though they are capable of reasoning (“people are depressed here because everyone always sees the same streets”) and of obscene performance.
Something else that is right: their vocabulary is extremely reduced, they keep repeating the same sentences, which also deconstructs the time of the movie. Then the movie repeats itself over and over again, the images, the dialogues, which adds up another deconstruction layer. It becomes like an opera: everything builds around the structure of the main area that comes in different forms, again and again. That is achieved through the use of mini-flash forwards and the momentary disconnection between the images and the dialogues. It feels like the characters are planning and projecting what will happen next. Then, it turns out that most of the time they coincide in their subjectivities, which again, is an amazing insight into teens.
Another remarkable thing is that – I am tented to say “for once”- the phone cameras are well used: they are not simply a substitution of the cinema camera, they transmit a point of view: it’s another way of telling us what matters for the teens: the alternation of large panoramic views (there were so many people!) and close-ups (unbelievable what they were doing!)
All the experimental stuff, with overpixelizing images, is great.
The objectification of the bodies in motion and still, even though it has been done a million times: it is still provoking to do it with such young bodies.
What else? Oh, yeah, well done on showing that context matters: they spend their days wearing bikinis, and that empowers them. It empowers them because they dare to show and daring is empowering. By contrast, when they are arrested, the Christian girl feels ‘naked’, she can’t continue the subversion.
The actors are great. Particularly James Franco, who, as he says, comes from outer-space. It feels like the actors are not playing, that that is just who they are, as if the crew had asked them to play themselves. Except we know for a fact they are playing since we have seen them elsewhere and with very different roles. Franco especially, of course.
There are so many well chosen scenes… I know I need to stop, but what about the opening of the prison-garage door shot from behind the girls backs? what about that door revealing Franco on his car waiting for the appearance of the almost naked girls? The transition from the dark room to Franco in plain light is great.
It also needs to be said that amazingly, we switch to a completely different atmosphere: the gangster world. And Franco’s revelation of the true interpretation of the American dream: “it’s about making money. That’s it. I did it.” His speech on all the stuff he owns, it’s fantastic: “I’ve got ESCAPE. Calvin Klein, Escape”, as if these objects became essential qualities.
This post is way too long so I’ll stop it there, but notice the assault on Britney’s Spears ballade.
PS: I acknowledge that Franco’s character is not very well explored, not to mention his rival. But who cares, they are just a plot progression device.
I frankly recommend it.
cucurbitacee 