Cannes. Afterschool.

"A handsome, widescreen cinematic essay on modes of perception amongst those raised in the TV-internet age, Afterschool marks out 24-year-old Antonio Campos as a filmmaker to watch," writes Howard Feinstein in Screen Daily.

"The filmmaker raises some significant philosophical issues. Is culpability more complicated because human actions are less and less a function of will power? Is original thought a thing of the past? Are we more and more able to live with ourselves as amoral creatures merely mimicking the behaviour of clichéd, unreal characters?"

"At a posh New England prep school, an introverted student finds himself witness to the tragic death by overdose of two beautiful twins," writes Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter. "To work through his angst, he makes a film about them. Somewhere between Gus Van Sant's Elephant and French artiness, this is a sophisticated stylistic exercise too rarefied for wide audiences, but earmarked for critical kudos."

The film "suggests a fascination with themes of voyeurism, violence and the ethics of image-making a la Michael Haneke," writes Justin Chang in Variety, but it "unsettles without illuminating, marred by narcotic pacing and a blank lead performance."

Update: "If the film deals with the standard strife of high school (budding love, jealousy and bitterness), it's far more disturbing and enigmatic than similarly set portrait, writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "Gus Van Sant's Elephant and Atom Egoyan's voyeuristic visions come to mind, but Campos's style remains unique: he frequently employs dislocating, fragmentary, or off-center frames - even a major kiss is barely seen, shoved to the bottom corner of the frame in favor of bobbing foreheads. And his thematic concerns are also his own: coming-of-age becomes a pathological condition and strange disconnected state, where the virtual worlds of violence and sex intermingle with the real."

Un Certain Regard.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 20, 2008 12:07 PM