Ken Park

I didn't enjoy this latest offering by Larry Clark. It was as if he took Todd Solondz' Happiness, removed all wit, all semblance of plot and character development, and threw in a few explicit sex scenes for some shock value.

After watching Bully and Kids, I have come to accept Clark's style of storytelling, however I felt that this movie went nowhere. He's usually good at juggling multiple story lines that end up converging in a natural sense, but I felt that in Ken Park he didn't have a enough time to delve into any single character's storyline deep enough for the audience to become engaged with the characters, which to me is a crucial element in any good drama.

When the 1h10 mark came around, I was more alarmed by the fact that there were only 20 more minutes in which to resolve the story than by the incest and murder taking place on screen.

This failure was akin to Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart. I hope Larry Clark's work will only get better after this.

In a city in California, the skateboarders Shawn (James Bullard), Claude (Stephen Jasso) and Tate (James Ransone) and Peeches (Tiffany Limos) are friends of the suicidal teenager Ken Park (Adam Chubbuck). Shawn has intercourse with his girlfriend and her mother. Claude has an abusive, violent and alcoholic father and a neglectful and passive pregnant mother. Tate is addicted in masturbation and hates his grandparents that raise him due to the lack of privacy in his own room. Peeches practices kinky sex and has a fanatical religious father that misses his wife.

"Ken Park" is a sad story of dysfunctional families and their teenagers. Most of the characters have sick and abnormal behaviors, but fortunately it is just a sample in the universe of director Larry Clark, who seems to like this theme, and does not correspond to the majority of the society. This uncomfortable movie is indicated for very specific audiences. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Ken Park"

Reading the local (Belgian) reviews for this movie, you'd seriously think we're moving back in time. Critics seem to be bending over backwards in their defense of sexually explicit imagery (okay, there's a little bit of what could be considered hardcore footage here, but nothing on the level of, say, BAISE-MOI for instance), once again trying to establish the thin line between art and pornography, forgetting (conveniently, perhaps ?) to really focus on the film instead. Could it be that Harmony Korine's razor sharp screenplay, largely based on the personal experiences of some of director Larry Clark's friends and models, actually hit too close to home for a lot of people to admit ?

Though the sleepy suburb in this movie might qualify as quintessential Americana by definition of many, I can assure you that the stuff that happens over there takes place all over the world. A lot of things both the adolescents and their parents go through were instantly recognizable to me personally, and I'm a 35 (going on 36) year old employee from that minuscule ant heap of a country called Belgium. How's that for universal appeal ?

Too many adult viewers would still seem to prefer to deny the very possibility that their teen-aged children harbor strong sexual desires, let alone the likely consequence that they've already acted upon them ! It may strike some as slightly unsavory that now 59 year old Larry Clark addresses such issues (especially given the level of unflinching honesty and carnal frankness demonstrated here), as he did in both KIDS and BULLY previously, but nearly no one else apparently dares to come anywhere near this topic as of yet. Much more than simply courting controversy, Clark (and co-helmer Lachman) have crafted a beautiful, funny, touching, heartbreaking and absolutely haunting (those final frames with the titular Ken Park will be etched in my mind for life) work of, yes, art.

A lot of older viewers have remarked that the film is somehow unfairly slanted in favor of the young characters (compelling actors the lot of them), rendering the adults as grotesque caricatures. As far as I'm concerned, only very inattentive viewers could ever come up with that assessment. Tate's grandparents may initially come across as whiny and pathetic yet there's a sweet little scene later on that shows their genuine affection for one another. It is both telling and sad that their grisly fate apparently elicits far less shocks from its audiences than those scant minutes of groin action. A world gone mad, indeed.

Claude's macho dad is another case in point. His ultimate transgression towards his son manages to be both disturbing and weirdly touching. Each adult character (let's not forget Claude's mom, engagingly portrayed by the underrated Amanda Plummer) gets at least one scene where the admittedly stereotypical surface is scratched away and subtleties like a single wounded glance can turn the whole story on its head. I sincerely love this movie precisely for doing just that.

I have no problems with the explicit content in the film, go ahead and show whatever you like, just do it for a reason other than to push the boundries. There's nothing less interesting than watching a movie that is based on the premise of Let's Make People Accept Something New. That's lame. It's cheap. The movie is not interesting in the least. It never goes anywhere. It seems as though Larry Clark's ideas for characters were just him thinking he wanted to push the limits of sex on film, and so that's what the characters are doing. They are in no way representative of a real person as this film tries to convince us. This film would be boundry pushing if it was able to contextualize the behaviour and not just put it on a screen. At the film festival Clark answered a question about the inclusion of the character of Ken Park, who seemed to exist for no real reason other than to begin the film with a suicide. Clark responded by saying that he wanted to deal with teenage suicide in the movie, which is fine, but just showing someone shoot themselves in the head is not dealing with teenage suicide. It just exploits violence. There doesn't seem to be any thought, beyond the voyeuristic tendancies of the film makers, in this movie at all.

The Australian government had this film banned. So, that obviously meant that this obscure film that I had never heard of was worth seeing. Thanks to them and the acclaim of Australian film critics (notably Margaret Pomeranz), I - and I assume many others - sought out this film so we could watch it for ourselves.

Whilst the film is certainly not perfect, and is in many ways superficial in it's treatment of the numerous relationships presented (at 90min, they could have easily added another half hour to expand on these), I am glad that films like this exist, if only because they offer an escape from the increasingly similar plots and content of the majority of modern cinema.