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| Released: |
1995 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
RITES-OF-PASSAGE
CONTROVERSIAL
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
90 |
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Kids begins with a pretty 12 year-old being deflowered in her bedroom while her toys and teddy bears look on. Her seducer is Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) an ugly, foul-mouthed teenager whom we shall soon discover carries the HIV virus. Kids ends with an even more beautiful, exotic 13 year-old (Yakira Pegueiro) suffering the same painful and probably fatal experience. In the next room, Telly's even more repulsive friend (Justin Pierce) rapes a comatose waif in white ankle-socks (Chloe Sevigny) - an event which we are made to watch in its brutal entirety. The middle section of the film is taken up with miscellaneous unpleasant behaviour (from kicking a cat to exposing oneself in the street), casual thefts from parents and shops, drug-taking and sexual bragging - some of it by children who look no older than ten - and gang violence. In the movie's main action sequence, our skateboarding heroes beat up a man and leave him for dead, simply because one of them has collided with him. Then, for good measure, they spit on him. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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| | This film was made, unbelievably, with money from Disney - though Disney executives have since disowned and refused to distribute it. Only too believably, Kids has been praised by some as an artistic masterpiece, a work of extraordinary social importance, and the most realistic view of modern youth since Lord of the Flies . According to Janet Maslin, the influential film critic of the New York Times, it's a "wake-up call to the world." | | Hmm. | | In its defence, the teenagers on display are convincingly acted by a nonprofessional cast, and the whole thing is shot professionally in a fake documentary style. It skilfully exploits adults' concern about youthful criminality, and carries a timely message about using condoms. | | However, Kids is really an exercise in brutalism, and more melodrama than drama. The characters never deepen beyond caricatures. It establishes characters we feel we should care about, then drops them as callously as its hero (we never do see that pretty 12 year-old again). | | The 19 year-old screenwriter Harmony Korine shows no interest in penetrating the facade of his central anti-hero, his family or social background, still less in challenging his self-image or attitudes. The film cries out for a dramatic denouement when Telly discovers that he has the HIV virus, and has infected others. That scene never comes, so we never do find out whether he has a conscience. | | The social insights are as vague and non-judgmental as one might expect from the director and prime begetter of the project, Larry Clark, a skateboarding 52 year-old with a prison record and a history of drug abuse, who "hangs out" with children a quarter of his age in Washington Park, New York City. Clark's custom-made skateboard is decorated with the picture of a teenage girl, winking and bending over so that her genitals are on display from the rear. | | Perhaps I am being unduly suspicious of Mr Clark's motives, but an examination of his second collection of still photographs, entitled Teenage Lust , reveals not so much a great movie moralist in the making, but someone with an abnormally keen interest in semi-nude teenagers. | | In one of his pictures, a youth points a gun at a naked young girl who is tied up and defenceless; he is visibly in a state of sexual arousal. In another photo, strikingly similar to the rape sequence which ends Kids , a girl comatose from drugs lies with a boy on top of her, and a caption beneath, lubriciously implying that she has just been the victim of multiple rape. | | Even those unaware of Mr Clark's past may experience unease at the way his movie camera lingers on very young girls simulating agony as they lose their virginity. And they may find something creepy, as well as ironic, in the film's insistence that "good" girls who have straight sex while in pursuit of a serious relationship are no less likely to catch HIV virus than promiscuous girls who indulge repeatedly in kinkier, more dangerous kinds of sex. | | There is nothing new about films which try to shock an older generation by showing teenagers behaving like delinquents - The Wild One, The Outsiders and River's Edge spring readily to mind. But few films have been as inept dramatically as Kids, as shamelessly voyeuristic, or as transparently eager to attract attention by "grossing out" an adult audience. | | Anyone who wishes to see the same subject approached with curiosity and compassion would do better to watch Bunuel's 1950 masterpiece about Mexican slum children, The Young and the Damned (Los Olvidados), or Martin Bell's Streetwise (1985), a moving documentary about child prostitutes in Seattle. | | |
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