Gus Van Sant's Elephant: How To - Page 3

Which is not to say that you can't tell it's a Van Sant movie. In this interview with FilmForce Van Sant cites Frederick Wiseman, the director of the great documentary High School (1968), among others, as someone who had got the kind of effect he was after. But despite the technique for attenuating a too-ready "message," for merely transmitting lived reality, Elephant can hardly be called documentary naturalism. I can admire it as one of the least banal movies about a headline issue ever (it can't even really be called discursive), but the long, long tracking shots following these dewy-faced kids, shots that go into and out of slow motion, are too hypnotic for naturalism.

In addition, I haven't read anything that comments on the difference in the way Van Sant views the boys and the girls. I was about to say that his style here makes the ordinary too sensuous for a documentary, but that's really only when he's got the boys in his sights. The camera caresses their cheeks and chests; there's no pull back even when the two shooters get into the shower together and experiment with a kiss.

By contrast, one of the strands involves three chattery girls who check out a jock one of them has a crush on, gossip about his girlfriend, have a spat over how much time you should spend with guys versus girlfriends, eat lunch and then go into the bathroom to regurgitate together before heading off campus to go shopping. You react to this sequence in a completely different way from everything else. The movie's dialogue is said to have been improvised, but the girls' hencoop prattle sounds scripted, wickedly, and the action feels choreographed, dementedly. When all three go into side-by-side stalls to puke it's like a dramatization of a medical article in a teen magazine as shot by Busby Berkeley. It made me sit up and respond as if the movie were an entertainment, and I wasn't sorry for the respite. It's the only sequence that doesn't require concentration, the only one that comes to you. It is also the closest the picture comes to irony. The girls' inane jabber and in-sync energy bring the movie in the range of Brian DePalma's version of Stephen King's Carrie (1976), in which we are free to enjoy the gaudy deaths of the bitchy chicks.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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