This is a terrible report coming out of Sydney about the banning of ``Ken
Park,'' not least because it denies Australian audiences a viewing of what I
think is the best American film of the year--by far.
Ross' precis on Clark is something I generally share--I would add that
Clark has a perfectly happy relationship and honest perspective on the
visualization of sex on screen, and that this visualization challenges our
common definitions of what porn actually is--but it can't be stressed enough
that ``Ken Park'' marks a huge quantum leap forward for him. In part, I
credit this to Clark's collaboration with cinematographer Ed Lachman, who
brings to Clark's suburban world of desperately lonely children and adults,
bouncing about in a welter of confusion and finding expression through sex,
intimacies, temporal friendship or violence, a sense of extreme vividness
and extraordinary beauty acting as an almost frightening contrapuntal force
to Clark's deliberate banality and slow-boil craziness.
``Ken Park'' is easily Clark's most extreme film, in every regard, and
some of this extremity is bound to utterly cloud the judgements of otherwise
rational people. For instance, I could imagine a perfectly fine and cogent
and smart fellow critic leaving a screening of ``Ken Park'' ready to read it
the Riot Act, and even secretly hope it would just go away. Fear and
loathing, as we know, are fellow travellers, and these responses will (and
did, starting at Telluride) rain down on ``Ken Park'' as on no other film
perhaps since Pasolini's ``Salo.'' What's exciting in Clark's
formulations in the new film is not only how he has managed to break through
to an entirely new and mature aesthetic, far surpassing in my view ``Bully''
or ``Kids,'' or that he has achieved an exquisite balance among the various
players in an extremely complicated ensemble (ensemble-meisters John Sayles
or Edward Yang would admire at the number and weight of most of the
characters). Beyond these, Clark has found an expressive way to forge a
genuinely revolutionary film. By that I mean that he has created something
that ventures beyond the moralism Ross accurately described in his previous
films. There's something finally in ``Ken Park'' (it wouldn't be fair to
reveal how) that celebrates the sheer joy in living and loving beyond norms,
and in a way that censors would definitely find deeply offensive. No film in
recent times challenges the viewer to consider and re-consider what sex is
on screen, what it means when we see who is doing it, and how we absorb the
action and the image. We end up somewhere in the realm of Henry Miller in
the end, where there's a radical denial of boundaries, where bourgeois
America is pretty much completely obliterated.
I truly don't know of another recent American film that has done so much
in so many ways--and in so many ways that will excite and anger people in
equal measure. Malraux's old complaint to Bunuel that audiences can't be
shocked anymore (thus, the end of the Surrealist project) was, as my
colleague Manohla Dargis recently noted, later contradicted by old Bunuel
himself. But it has been outrageously, thoroughly, gleefully contradicted
anew by ``Ken Park.''
Robert Koehler
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