REVIEW: AFTERSCHOOL

GUEST BLOGGER MIKE D'ANGELO 

Remember in Mulholland Dr. when that creepy dude points at the headshot and says, flatly, "This is the girl"? Try to imagine me heavier and much more intimidating as I tell you with equally unshakable certitude: This is the film. All of 23 years old at the time of shooting, Campos tackles head-on the key subject of the early 21st century, viz. mediation, and delivers the first movie I've seen that seems to recognize how drastically the (developed) world has changed in just the last several years, and the extent to which we're now both starved for authenticity and dedicated to pretense. What's more, he does so with a formal control and ingenuity that's nothing short of breathtaking, especially for a neophyte. Switching deftly back and forth between panoramic widescreen celluloid and cramped, windowboxed consumer video, Afterschool deliberately blurs the line between the two: Not only are the "objective" shots brilliantly artless, forever trained on the wrong spot or cutting someone in half at the edge of the frame, but much of the video imagery -- most especially Rob's A/V project, which abruptly turns from mundane B-roll into something so horrifying it can barely be processed, much less resolved -- evinces the chilly neutrality of Haneke or the Asian master-shot school. (And then there are shots that are just plain stunning, with D.P. Jody Lee Lipes working expressionist miracles via the tonal contrast between foreground clarity and backgrounds so magnificently blurred they resemble lost Monets.) Within this unique, semi-alienating worldview, Campos constructs a portrait of Generation YouTube (set here in high school, appropriately, but encompassing all ages) that's somehow at once compassionate and merciless -- which is to say, utterly true. The scene of Rob tentatively applying lessons learned from gonzo porn on new girlfriend Amy does in just a handful of seconds what Larry Clark spent half an hour belaboring in his Destricted short, and is beautifully counterweighted by his (Rob's) later act of sweet generosity in giving Amy his shirt to mop up the post-coital blood. Key moments in the characters' lives wind up scrutinized on the net hours later -- or they find "alternate takes" of events they themselves recorded, captured by persons unknown with ethical imperatives unrecognized. Even minor details cut clean: When Rob calls his mother to tell her he's not fitting in, her response is so credibly concerned-yet-destructive that it made me annoyed at the equivalent moment in Wendy and Lucy all over again. And while at first I thought Campos had erred in continuing beyond the re-edited memorial video, his actual ending will haunt me as long as it haunts Rob. Sorrowfully observing the quest for something real in a terrain of orchestrated lies, Afterschool never once flinches. This is how we live.

Read more reviews on The Man Who Viewed Too Much

Watch FilmCatcher's interview with Antonio Campos

Posted on 09/03/08 by: FCFeatures 03:17 PM

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