Kids. - movie reviews

Art in America, Oct, 1995 by Liza Bear

Directed by Larry Clark; written by Harmony Korine; produced by Cary Woods; released by Excalibur.

It's been quite a year for teen flicks of all persuasions, from Chantal Akerman's edgy and sublime Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the Sixties to Basketball Diaries, a less than successful adaptation of Jim Carroll's precocious journals from the same decade, to Jennifer Montgomery's deadpan and reflective Art for Teachers of Children, a fictionalized expose of her own ambivalence about a rapport she had at 14 with her married photography teacher.

Released without its NC-17 rating, Larry Clark's Kids is something else again--a jolting inside look at the sexual mores and dissolute lifestyle of a tiny segment of New York's teen skateboard culture. With this debut feature, Clark displays a sure hand as a director, expertly negotiating the transition from a world-class still photographer to the more treacherous rigors of cinema. In 1971 Clark made his mark with Tulsa, a ground-breaking collection of black-and-white photographs of his friends shooting up in cars and abandoned buildings. Taken in available light, these sometimes harrowing photos were acclaimed for their authenticity.

Not a total stranger to the cinematic medium (his later photo books include 16mm film strips), he now fulfills a longtime ambition to make a dramatic film with which teenagers can identify, and with which he can identify--a '90s correlative for his own experience as a delinquent youth in the '50s.

Adjusting from the photographer's empathetic solitude to the director's much more high-keyed interactions with a full-scale cast and crew, Clark made impeccable cinematic choices from the start. With its single-strand plot line, merciless screenplay by former skateboard aficionado Harmony Korine (19 when he wrote it), first-rate performances by a cast composed largely of nonactors and the grab-ass camera work of Eric Edwards, Kids achieves a rare intensity of focus. Weaving frenetically through crowded locales, the mostly hand-held camera brings both vigor and dexterity to the film's turbulent encounters. The combination of speed, tight framing and dense compositions sucks up the viewer's gaze like a vacuum hose, riveting the eyes to the screen.

Strong meat provokes strong reactions. Sure to upset the extreme right for its douche-bag dialogue, everyone else for its unprotected sex and its misogynist viewpoint, Kids is nevertheless a sobering must-see--not only for teenagers and their beleaguered parents but for other mortals as well.

The simple, straightforward story takes place over 24 hours at the height of summer. Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a juvenile Don Juan, practices safe sex not by using a condom (nowhere in evidence except in background subway posters), but by sleeping mostly with virgins whom he's able to sweet-talk or pressure into compliance. Sneering, adenoidal and bony, devoid of any discernible physical appeal (his private parts are not available to the camera), Fitzpatrick in the role admirably conveys a knowing callousness.

The film opens on Telly's first conquest of the day (shot in graphic detail) and follows him as he gloats afterwards to his best buddy, Casper (Justin Pierce). It's a toss-up which part of his anatomy is the viler. "Virgins, I love them," he squawks in voice-over before the front credits roll. "No loose-as-a-goose pussy." (Telly has a penchant for internal rhymes.) "That hurts," Girl No. I protests. "Just pure pleasure," he replies, continuing to lunge at her, gearing the activity exclusively to his own need. Sex for the film's young studs is in the three G's mode--get it up, get it in, get it off. He departs abruptly, leaving the young girl to the stuffed animals in her bedroom. For good measure, he spits on her parents' dining room table as he swings gleefully on the banisters and vanishes out the door and out of her life.

"I'm getting addicted to virgins," he tells Casper, who's swilling beer outside, and lets him smell his hand as proof. The two get on with their day of petty thievery, boasting, drunken brawls, pot-smoking, gay-baiting in the park, and partying. They insult an Asian shopkeeper, steal a fresh bottle from his store and leave the empties on the street. While Telly steals money from his mother, who smokes when she's breast-feeding and is the only parent in the film, Casper makes lewd comments about her breasts and sucks on a fresh tampon dipped in cherry soda.

Bracketing the sex is the sex talk--the honeyed, deceptive tones that precede the act, the scathing rawness of the words that come after. Intercutting scenes of boys and girls discussing oral sex sharpens contrasts in attitude (what's appealing to the boys is revolting to the girls). There's absolutely no sign of understanding between the genders.

Bringing to the screen the unmitigated virulence and misogyny that's made gangsta lyrics so controversial, the film's language sets a new standard for explicitness and veracity, While it avoids pornographic cliche (one girl giggling that the little sperm get stuck between her teeth during fellatio is about as cute as it gets), mostly it's so raw as to leave nothing to the imagination.