Teen angle

ArtForum, Jan, 2004 by Bruce Hainley

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Hans und Grete opens with two pairs of feet, dirty socks on, friskily mingling, at the end of a bed, midfuck, a scene soon juxtaposed with an endlessly spurting cock, fake as its unbelievable load; it ends with a girl in her bedroom, alone. Despite a script made up of various appropriated texts, what holds attention isn't "action" (narrative, plot) but visual derangement and emotionality. De Beer takes full advantage of the unnerving discontinuity of where her dual projections meet: Projected in a corner (punished dummkopf's position), the video creates bodies impossibly collapsing into themselves or reveals the cracks in the constructed mask of the self the face presents to the world. The gorgeous loners attempt to articulate through pauses and aphasic gaps as much as words their individual plights, but their visages--split by the dual video projection's seam (and seeming)--reveal the wounded sinthome joining the visually dissimilar pairs of protagonists (goth versus prep rocker), played by Travis Jeppesen and Lena Lauzemis. Everyone in the film is thinking about what they're doing or supposed to do and who they are, and they find they're in every way "other"--the creature reality. No fashionable reserve, no cool distancing, de Beer's generous gift of emotional honesty, as in the best songs of Will Oldham or Chan Marshall, makes the project project, all the while featuring anti- and super-natural homemade artifice as structuring ground. At times staring out blankly and at other times speaking in voice-over as he performs some private ritual with a hunting knife and a stuffed dog while smoking a cigarette, Kip declares: "People can leave, die, disappear, run away, you know, whatever, but you can never be completely rid of a person because there's always something that proves them to you again. It's like there are invisible connections that exist between you and every person you've ever met. That keeps pulling you back together again forever--and you know, you can't change that."

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De Beer's use of decor somewhat lightens the proceedings: A raunchy, ornamental gnome stands with buttocks bared until Seth smashes him to bits with his guitar; a bed headboard displays "Kitty," sometimes in reverse cursive; stuffed and ceramic animals witness most of the teens' goings-on. There's as much humor as poignance when Seth announces his plans to become a supreme being of the recording studio: "I mean, you know, there are some guys who are just cut out for that. You know, you've got people like, uh, Morrison, Hendrix, Robert Plant, Jagger, probably to a lesser extent somebody like Scott Weiland, you know, the guy from the Stone Temple Pilots. But I mean, like, you know, the thing is when you see somebody like that, who just ... with that sort of star quality, you just know it. And it probably has less to do with talent than just the fact that these people just radiate this sort of magnetism that the world can't resist." De Beer shows Seth posing, picking up his guitar, and rocking out in a black hair-rocker wig while his girlfriend, in a baby-blue T-shirt, lounges on her bed. De Beer juxtaposes the couple with goth angel Kathleen making music alone in her room. Boys announce things in ways girls don't or usually aren't encouraged to. Seth can enunciate his rock-god lineage; Kathleen might be channeling Kathleen Hanna, Siouxsie Sioux, or even Meinhof but declaims nothing, even if the entire sequence is called, in an intertitle, "Kathleen's 8-Track Demo." Only after this does Seth get to rock out by himself: He plays a riff and says it's what we'll remember.