Blog From The Bench

Toronto Film Festival 2007

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13

Funny, and how appropriate that the last Gus Van Sant that I saw was 2003’s Elephant since with Paranoid Park it almost feels as if we have followed the filmmaker and his camera on one of those giant, loopy circular pathways that define that earlier film, and have found ourselves once again meandering down the same empty, cavernous hallway of an anonymous American high school. That’s not to say that Paranoid Park is a retread in any way, because setting aside, Paranoid Park’s fractured, occasionally jarring narrative style is more immediately palatable (though I deliberately avoid the term “conventional”) than Elephant’s elliptical tracking shots and wispy threads of plotline; the basic story, adapted from a novel by Blake Nelson, concerns itself with the emotional fallout a high school skateboarder experiences after inadvertently causing the death of a security guard. Paranoid Park can be seen as an exploration of how the traumatic experiences forces an emotionally detached individual to deal with the specifics of his life (the disintegration of his family life, an obnoxious girlfriend he doesn’t like to be around, an uneasy, growing attraction to a girl on the fringes of high school society) all the while finding himself increasingly unable to cope with what seems like an irreversible downward spiral. Van Sant—aided by the masterful camera of cinematographer Christopher Doyle—treat the specifics of the narrative as details of marginal importance, completely honing their focus on navigating an increasingly turbulent emotional landscape. That no concrete outcome is ever given or even hinted at is certainly a risky narrative decision, but it pays off brilliantly as Van Sant and Doyle’s poetic reveries-turned-nightmares prove to be more compelling and haunting than any straightforward depiction of the basic story could ever have been.