NYFF. Afterschool.

"Afterschool, the debut feature of Antonio Campos, a 25-year-old New Yorker, unfolds in the cloistered environment of an elite boarding school, though it is perhaps more relevant to say that it takes place within the brave new world of digital information overload," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "Shot mainly on old-fashioned celluloid but fluent in the language of viral video, the film combines the timeless bewilderment of adolescence with a very contemporary recognition that for many of us - not least adolescents - reality is now largely a virtual experience."

"Remember in Mulholland Dr when that creepy dude points at the headshot and says, flatly, 'This is the girl'?" asks Mike D'Angelo at Filmcatcher. "Try to imagine me heavier and much more intimidating as I tell you with equally unshakable certitude: This is the film." It's also "the first movie I've seen that seems to recognize how drastically the (developed) world has changed in just the last several years, and the extent to which we're now both starved for authenticity and dedicated to pretense."

"The crux of the film, its Twin Peaks moment if you will," explains Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook (and there must be something about this film calls Lynch to mind), "is when introverted young Robert (Ezra Miller) is working on establishing shots for his A/V club project at school. He records take after take of a pan across a classroom hallway, working on his framing and zoom level, until suddenly out of a doorway down the hall stumbles one of the school's beloved, blond senior beauty queens, dragging her unconscious twin sister with her until the two collapse in squeals of pain. This is all shown solely from the point of view of Robert's video camera, culminating, after a stunned pause, with Robert in a stupor approaching the bleeding girls at the far end of the shot and, instead of calling for help or assisting them, him cradling one girl in his arms as she dies.... Though the motif of video not as interactive voyeur but simply as observational surveillance is only one thread of Afterschool, it proves to be the most ambitious and most lasting, taking the film out of its high school clichés and into the implications of the outside world."

"What would a psychiatrist prescribe to director Antonio Campos for framing the world like Gus Van Sant and wagging his finger at us like Michael Haneke?" wonders Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Campos operates in two equally pretentious modes: the one that necessitates abstracting recognizable human emotion, letting the film coast on wonky aesthetic vibes (like another borderline con artist, Lucrecia Martel, he often confuses ambiguity for depth), and the one that requires repeatedly underlining his salient point about media saturation and the sense of mendacity it perpetuates with Hanekeian admonishment."

"Once made..., Afterschool proceeds to regurgitate its thesis with all the grace of a lumberjack leveling a redwood," writes Nick Schager. "[T]he narrative is mainly content to simply dawdle over its rather transparent, Michael Haneke-ish arguments about voyeurism (it's damaging, and the audience is guilty of it), privilege (it's bad), and the ramifications of modern media on interpersonal relationships (it's even worse)."

"Afterschool is clearly the opening volley of a campaign that's sure to play out for at least the next ten years: people roughly my age (Campos is 24) trying to sum up the zeitgeist in two hours or less." Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door: "So either I'm out of the zeitgeist, an unintentional Luddite, or Campos' diagnosis - never stated in so many words, but his ambition suffuses every scene - is, in its own way, as half-assed as the utopian visions of liberal politics resurgent through TEH INTERWEBZ in Diary of the Dead. Whatever it is, I'm not convinced. I neither learned from nor recognized anything in this movie. How it resonates with others remains to be seen."

Anthony Kaufman talks with Campos for the Voice.

Online viewing tip. Filmcatcher interviews Campos.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 10/7: "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." Filmbrain finds this one "dire."

"Afterschool plays like a film student's demo reel of the various ways to signify 'alienation' - shallow depth of field, over-lit sterile interiors, ambient sounds of fluorescent light hums, expressionless actors, methodical tracking shots frequently overrunning or catching up to their human subjects." Michael Joshua Rowin in Reverse Shot: "Even the best filmmakers should take care in how they choose to explore new implementations for these overused techniques - Gus Van Sant's recent Paranoid Park, for example, succeeds at most of the above nearly despite itself - but you'd think Afterschool's 24-year-old first-time feature director Antonio Campos had just discovered them for himself by the way he embarrassingly assaults the viewers with them in order to fashion his astonishingly shallow portrait of teenage disaffection.

Update, 10/8: Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video from the Q&A.

Update, 10/15: "[T]he film still plays out like a Van Sant film without the interesting music choices," writes Stephen Snart at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "As it happens, in trying so hard to avoid Elephant, he may have inadvertently caused it to sharply resemble Van Sant's latest - Paranoid Park - a far superior film about a similarly vapid, vacant-eyed teen and his coming to terms with his culpability in witnessing (or perhaps causing) an accidental death."

Update, 10/20: Brandon Harris talks with Campos - and asks about his "Media Diet" at the SpoutBlog.

Posted by dwhudson at October 5, 2008 7:31 AM