Local queer indie favorite Director Gus Van Sant has a talent for portraying Portland on screen. Filled with beautiful boys and bridges, dark cracking concrete playgrounds, and the grassy dunes by the Pacific, critically acclaimed Paranoid Park is no different. And Monday’s PIFF screening, a chance to meet the infamous director, and a benefit for Outside In, is worth going to for just those reasons. But I’ve got a secret to share with you. The film doesn’t live up to the hype.
The cinematography is unflinchingly beautiful. Van Sant turns skateboarding into ballet and blank, awkward teenage facial expressions into pretty portraits. It works wonderfully as an experimental art piece, a much calmer Matthew Barney.
But once you add the story line those blank mugs become just that, blank. And those numbly staring eyes are supposed to be telling us something about youth culture, I’m sure, but I really couldn’t gather any reason to care. Our hero, Alex (Gabe Nevins), flows through life as an unfulfilled and apathetic teenager who longs for the gritty and intense. When he finally finds it, this traumatic experience is too much for him.
Perhaps there is some lesson here. But a kid with divorcing parents, a vapid girlfriend, and some good friends mixed with boring ones doesn’t garner all that much sympathy from me. Adolescence is hard for anyone and Van Sant’s former subjects, narcoleptic boy prostitutes etc. seemed to have much more to be concerned about. I do feel sorry for Alex’s emptiness but he isn’t powerless.
What does come through, unfortunately all too clearly, is the heavy handed use of score in an attempt to add drama where there is shockingly little, even in light of the tragic “event” that stands as the crux of the plot.
I’m all for Gus’s well-known gay style and I would only chide him slightly for the overindulgent gawking at teenage boys because we all have to admit a certain amount of voyeuristic pleasures in life. But next time, can the subjects be interesting as well as pretty?
