Push on Gus

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, which is coming out on November 29, is another triumphant of the last Cannes: it took the so-called. Special prize of the 60th anniversary festival. These are awarded only once every five years. Of course, this is not the Palme d'Or, but Van Sant already has the Palme d'Or - along with the prize for directing, he received it at Cannes 2003 for The Elephant. American Gus Van Sant makes films, of course, about America. Paranoid Park is set in Portland. But like some other American front-line writers, notably Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch, Van Sant is now financed by the French. Thanks to this, he is in a special position compared to ordinary directors, especially American ones: he can do what he wants (fortunately, his modest films will surely pay off someday). And he wants, which is obvious from all his latest paintings (let's also mention "Jerry" and "The Last Days"), to reflect on one of the eternal topics - "youth and death."

"Paranoid Park" at first resembles the films of the scandalous photographer and film director Larry Clark - "Kids" and the similarly named "Ken Park". There are also a lot of skateboarders here, and the operator's camera follows their flights with visible pleasure. It is worth mentioning the operator separately, because this is Christopher Doyle - in fact, the only person known to the public in his profession. Doyle has directed all of Wong Kar-wai's films (except the latest My Blueberry Nights), but now he seems to have defected to Van Sant. However, they have already collaborated once: they made a remake of Psychosis.

But we're talking about Clark. About kids. The difference is that Clark's young characters are teenage extremists (not extremists). And the main character of "Paranoid Park" is a good, capable, including self-reflection, 16-year-old boy. Who, regularly visiting the playground in Portland's Paranoid Park with a skateboard, one evening gets into a random company and a bad story.

Not immediately, by the way, it is clear what exactly he got himself into. It's just that the main character is clearly worried about the appearance of police officers at his school investigating the mysterious death of a railway watchman that happened nearby. From The Elephant to Paranoid Park, Van Sant perfects a newly invented form of film storytelling. Watching The Elephant, at different moments of the film you see the same situations with different eyes from different points of view, not immediately understanding what exactly the film is leading to. And it leads to a topic that was sadly relevant last week - the shooting by schoolchildren of their classmates and teachers. The same, the most terribly famous, iconic, in American Columbine.

Watching Paranoid Park, from time to time you observe situations you already know, but with new knowledge - which allows you to discern previously unnoticed details in these scenes. Right curious! In the end, you understand that the railway watchman died precisely because of the main character. It’s not that he’s to blame - the watchman also behaved like a fool. It so happened: the watchman tried to hit the boy who climbed on the bandwagon of a slowly moving train, the boy brushed it off, the watchman stumbled under an oncoming one... watching horror movies - only now he can't laugh at all). The boy hides the story - although it does not let him live. He turns his experiences into a diary.

The general complaint about the film from the well-known world film critics, which they expressed during the days of the Cannes film battles, is, in fact, what is it about? It seems clear to me what. Van Sant started out as a gay theme singer. The most talented directors who have paid tribute to this theme (let us mention such different ones as Almodovar and Ozon), according to some strange law, then become the most subtle researchers of the gender theme: the opposition “male-female”, the paradoxes of the female, the paradoxes of the male. The same Almodovar and Ozon are clearly - in different ways - interested in the paradoxes of the feminine. Van Sant - male. All through the 2000s - "Jerry", "Elephant", "The Last Days" - he talks about the breakdowns experienced by young males. And most of all he is worried about the causes of early deaths. These are variations on the theme “Is it easy to be young?”, popular in the Soviet perestroika years, but obviously very personal. Apparently, Van Sant considers it the rule, not the exception, when fate puts a teenage boy on the brink of disaster. If at the age of 15-17, due to sheer stupidity, he becomes either a criminal or a victim. In general, it is not clear how people at this age survive.

Here, based on my own experience, I absolutely agree with Van Sant. Everything is fine in your youth, but one evening they say to you: “Weak?” And to refuse, according to teenage concepts, is a shame, even if you don’t like the matter and understand that you are being provoked. And you get stuck. The author of these lines, like the hero of Paranoid Park, was also a very decent boy, but also a street boy, because he was born and raised in the south, and there simply are no street boys there. Van Sant's film made me remember that there were at least two situations when the author could thunder into a colony out of the blue or - with the same trifle - lay down as a corpse. Van Sant expands on this idea of ​​youthful obscurity in a marvelously effective sequence, equally effectively filmed by Doyle, when schoolchildren suspected of being responsible for the death of a railroad guard are summoned to the headmaster, who has an investigator. The corridor is empty - and suddenly two students silently appear on the right, two on the left, etc., until the corridor turns into a darkly full-flowing teenage river moving towards the viewer. Potentially, anyone could be in the place of the main character. Everyone could be the culprit.

Projecting Van Sant's experience onto your own, you come to the radical conclusion that there is nothing more stupid than the concept of a "problem teenager." There are no easy teenagers. And - another important idea of ​​the film - these teenagers are difficult because they simply cannot remove the burden from the soul. They have no one to share their problems with. Moreover, you can’t share it with your parents - it’s not for nothing that parents appear in Paranoid Park only as blurry figures in the background. They, in fact, do not exist. Alienation from the world is complete.

Reconstructing youth that is common to many, Van Sant comes to yet another, seemingly elementary, but few people realized truth - that in the transition to adulthood, a person begins to romanticize youth. And why? But because he quickly forgets what she really was. Why does he forget? But because there is too much unpleasant, from which the consciousness longs to get rid of and which simply displaces. This idea is largely played out by music. The idyllic meeting of a boy and his girl in Paranoid Park goes along with the theme of Nino Rota from Fellini's Amarcord. Amarcord, for all its genius, is an example of how we romanticize youth as adults, forgetting what happened in reality, how cruel youth was, to what despair it drove.

"Paranoid Park" is exactly what about the reality of youth. When the protagonist of the film grows up, he, too, will probably try to forget about the corpse of a man cut up by a train on the railway tracks. And youth will also return to him in a romantic pink haze.