AT THE FESTIVAL DU NOUVEAU CINÉMA.
T’CHA DUNLEVY looks at three films bonded by a provocative vision of teens in torment. In the Serbian movie Clip (centre right), girls record their every move for online posterity; the Irish drama Dollhouse (centre left) follows youths on a rampage throug
The Breakfast Club was never like this. Three provocative films at the 41st Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC), which runs Wednesday through Oct. 21, show young people in revolt — fighting, drinking, doing drugs, having sex, killing people and otherwise desecrating the rules of civilized society.
Maja Milos’s debut, Clip, is a sort of Serbian Girls Gone Wild, in which female teens get wasted, obsess over sex and tell their parents off, recording their every move on camera phones for immediate posting on the Internet.
Irish filmmaker Kirsten Sheridan’s Dollhouse is the equally intense — if less explicit — tale of a group of lower-class youths who raid a fancy home, partying hard and dangerous to the break of dawn.
Alejandro Fadel’s first film, Los Salvajes (which translates as The Savages, or The Wild Ones), follows five young people who escape from a detention centre and set out on a violent, existential journey into the Argentine countryside.
While varying in tone, all three depict a teenage world of extremes, where guidance is nowhere to be found and communication tactics are the epitome of tough love.
“The younger generation is very cruel in showing emotions,” Milos said in a Skype interview from her home in Belgrade this week.
“Social turbulence is very strong in (the environment) in which they’re living. The whole surroundings are very harsh.
“There is a very strong energy there that doesn’t know how to direct itself. It started from a social issue — I wanted to make a socially aware film, but not propaganda. I wanted a love story — to see what’s going on with relationships.”
Milos got intrigued six years ago when she came across online “clips” of young people bullying each other, ganging up on teachers and engaging in sexual activity at school.
“The first thing I felt was that something is boiling,” she said.
She continued her research, finding more and more clips, seeking out young Serbians engaged in this type of activity, befriending and interviewing as many as she could find while writing her script over a two-year period.
Realism was key, and she did her utmost to ensure the content of her film was true to life.
“There aren’t a lot of films speaking directly and honestly — in a non-judgmental way — about the problems of the younger generation,” she said.
Behind Clip’s shocking premise is the story of a young girl, Jasna, looking for escape from the grim reality at home. Her family is poor, her father is sick and her country is a mess. Milos sees Jasna’s behaviour as a direct reaction to her environment.
“The younger generation is distancing itself from every socially accepted form of behaviour, and from cruel reality, which is very grey and very dull,” she said.
“I think it’s natural, when kids have problems in the family. It’s a burden for them. Every teenager would like to have a colourful life.”
Jasna documents herself writhing in her underwear on her bed, pleasuring an older boy in the school bathroom and partying with her pals. Milos uses hand-held camera for much of the film, switching to the grainy perspective of Jasna’s phone for added authenticity. The point was not to shock so much as to immerse us in the world of her characters, Milos explained.
“(These images) represent their life, their point of view. How do they perceive their reality? How are they grabbing that life, and making it much more colourful than it is? It’s the new way of communicating.”
Sheridan uses hand-held camera almost exclusively
in Dollhouse. The film is a destabilizing whirlwind, pulsating with the manic energy of a group of kids on a rampage. Most of the scenes were shot f rom mere outlines, leading to more than 100 hours of footage, which she edited herself.
“My cameraman (Ross McDonnell) is a documentary director,” said Sheridan, who is the daughter of director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, Get Rich or Die Tryin’). “I wanted someone who could recognize where the story was happening and keep roll- ing, rather than someone who wanted to stop, set up and put control on it.
“Hand-held camera was a necessity. I wanted the actors to have 360 degrees (range of motion), so we had no lights, all practicals. At times, I think we might have shot too close-up, but I guess that helps with the claustrophobia.”
Dollhouse is the first release by The Factory, the company Sheridan formed with fellow Irish directors John Carney (Once) and Lance Daly (Kisses). After helming two previous features (Disco Pigs, August Rush), she wanted to get back to basics.
“I had a free location, this house,” she said. “I thought, ‘I should really shoot something there.’ I was tired of trying to raise money for bigbudget films. I wanted something new, experimental and extreme. So I wrote a 15-page treatment and decided to make it all improvised dialogue and not reveal the plot to my actors.”
At the heart of the story are the unpredictable interpersonal dynamics between a group of young people on the prowl, where tensions are ever on the verge of boiling over.
“I was very interested in teens now,” Sheridan said, “this generation below mine — how lost they seem, especially in Ireland. The Catholic Church, the banks and the government have all crumbled.
“We’re in such shifting sands. I was interested in exploring this group of characters who can’t articulate things, who don’t know what’s going on and are closed off from themselves and the world.”
The urban youths in Fadel’s Los Salvajes are also closed
off, but they are not barricaded in a house. Rather, the director sets them loose in the expanse of nature. For him, as for Sheridan, the setting came first.
“The idea came from wanting to document this landscape, before I had the story or the characters,” he said.
“I knew I wanted the landscape to be visited on foot — like a sort of religious pil- grimage, a road movie where the route is uncertain.”
Fadel’s camera wanders, following each of his five characters (four boys, one girl) as the tale unfolds, leaving us never quite sure where it’s all going or where it will end up.
“The film is not in the first person,” he said. “You’re not always with the characters. You’re trying to understand them. Sometimes you don’t understand anything. I like films where the point of view is put in conflict, where you can’t tell if what you feel for the characters is affection or distance.”
In contrast to Milos and Sheridan’s hand-held cameras, close-ups and relentless intensity, Fadel pulls back to capture an almost meditative atmosphere. Los Salvajes portrays the most brutal violence of the three films, but often off-screen or from a distance.
“I thought, ‘I can’t show violence in a polemic way, to shock the spectator,’ ” he said. “The violence is the first level of the film. Violence is only the excuse; the story is in the walking. If the film works, you can access another level that is more subtle; this is the truth of the film.”
Ultimately, and surreptitiously, Los Salvajes pulls you in, its slow pace — punctuated by bursts of action — and errant narrative leading to an unexpectedly affecting film-going experience.
“One of the themes of the film is solitude,” Fadel said, “not being alone, but being without family, country or state. You can sense that these young people are the most unprotected (in society).
“I think they’re looking for God. And really, I don’t know if God is there.” The Festival du nouveau cinéma runs Wednesday to
Oct. 21. Clip screens Oct. 19 at 6:15 p.m. and Oct. 20 at 3:30 p.m. at Excentris, 3536
St. Laurent Blvd. Dollhouse screens Oct. 18 at 1:30 p.m. and Oct. 21 at 5:20 p.m.
at Excentris. Los Salvajes screens Oct. 15 at 9:40 p.m. at Quartier Latin, 350 Émery St., and Oct. 17 at 5:30 p.m. at Excentris. The films are shown as part of the festival’s Temps Ø series. For tickets and more information, call 514-844-2172 or visit www. nouveaucinema.ca