NYFF Review: Afterschool

There are two films at this year's New York Film Festival that have today's youth at their core, yet they couldn't possibly be more antipodal. One is a sumptuous, poetic ode to the Nouvelle Vague, featuring two beautifully scripted characters whose archetypal teenage rebellion is handled with sensitivity and grace, while the other is little more than vacuous pretension that condescendingly hammers its faux-profundity into us for nearly two hours.

I wasn't planning on writing anything about Antonio Campos' dire Afterschool. After all, it did receive some wonderful praise both at Cannes and at home -- Dennis Lim championed it in the Times, and Mike D'Angelo called it a masterpiece, assigning it the highest grade he's given a film (if I'm not mistaken) in six years. Yet when I saw Gerardo Naranjo's I'm Gonna Explode (Yo A Explotar) I found myself drawing comparisons to Afterschool; particularly the way each presents their troubled teens, and their approach to the cinematic predecessors that inform their work as directors. Both films wear their influences on their sleeves, yet what they do with them (or rather, don't) clearly distinguishes the auteur from the fauxteur.

Set in a prestigious private school somewhere north of New York City, Campos' debut feature plays out like an episode of Gossip Girl co-directed by Michael Haneke and Gus Van Sant. The film opens with a montage of viral clips -- baby laughing, cat piano-playing, Saddam hanging -- but wait, what's this? -- our anti-hero Robert (Ezra Miller) leaves the safe confines of YouTube for nastycumholes.com, where he gazes upon a bit of POV porn that goes from humiliation of its "amateur" actress to outright violence -- an act that has a powerful effect on young Robert, who trawls the web in search of things that feel real. Naturally, Robert will mimic this gesture in the real world, thereby giving proof to the adage that kids will repeat what they see in movies on tv on the Internets. 

With a healthy blend of ennui and school-dispensed meds, the students of Privileged High spend their days shuffling around in a somnambulistic haze, occasionally stopping to taunt one another. Adults exist purely beyond the focal point, and are mostly portrayed as clueless, out-of-touch hypocrites. A newly-formed AV club gets Robert behind the camera, where a long take of a school hallway for a docu-project results in his catching the deaths of the pretty & popular Talbert twins on film, who have fallen prey to tainted cocaine. The scene, which ends with an unexpected rewinding of tape, unfolds exactly like the opening of Caché. However, unlike Haneke's film, in which the relationship between the past and present is the central argument of the film, it here serves as nothing more than an empty gimmick, just one of many that the film employs throughout.

Campos knows his Haneke, his Van Sant, his Tarr, his Wiseman (who he explicitly namechecks), yet his incorporation of their aesthetic techniques never goes beyond the superficial; this is mimicry, not homage. He doesn't build on their ideas, nor translates or interprets them to function within the context of his story. Instead they are bludgeoning devices, and by the end of the film all of the off-camera framing and shallow depth of field loses any sense of poignancy (or relevance) and simply becomes laughable. (We get it, Antonio! We get it!)

In hopes that it might serve as catharsis, Robert's teacher asks him to create a memorial film for the dead twins, and his final product certainly captures the "realness" of it all (right down to the tears of the grieving parents), but of course the powers that be reject his vision, instead replacing it with a visual Hallmark card, twinkly piano music and all. Heavy. Still convinced that the nail can be pounded further in, Campos proceeds to give us a handful of false (and meaningless) endings until we too are shown to be complicit in the tragedy.

It's often said that you should write what you know, and perhaps that's exactly where Campos went wrong. A product of elite private schools himself, the film lacks a much-needed critical distance from both its subject and character types, and, to his defense, maybe that's hard to achieve at 23. Mike D'Angelo's still-baffling-to-me rave ends with a heady proclamation -- "This is how we live." But does Afterschool truly say anything new about the net-generation (alienating effects and all) that hasn't been explored in works ranging from Lain to Lily Chou-Chou to LOL

Comments

[mjr]

Then you obviously failed to understand my point. The point is that Kubrick's approach fits his subject, whereas Campos' does not. Kubrick's astronauts aren't "exaggeratedly zombified" because their behavior makes sense within their environment; Campos' teens are "exaggeratedly zombified" because their behavior does not, which is why his film comes across as so laughably overwrought. Anyway, I hope you weren't trying to read my review against its meaning. That would be insulting, and betray an inability to understand criticism on your part.

[Alex]

I actually went to school with Antonio, and you should all know that the headmaster in the film is a very accurate portrayal of our Dean. I know it's hard to believe, but it's true.