81. River’s Edge (1986)

by Sam Juliano

A persuasive case could be made for 1986’s subversive River’s Edge as the most nihilist film about teenagers ever made.  The fact that this perverse drama was directed by one who just four years earlier gave the coming-of-age angle a conventional if perceptive spin in Tex, (based on the S.E. Hinton novel) makes it all the more startling, but to be sure Tim Hunter was filtering an unconscionable event that took place in California in 1981.  Without the factual underpinning the story would read as over-the-top fraudulence, fueled by its sensational implausibility.  But when a 16 year old male named Anthony Jacques Broussard raped and murdered his 14 year-old girlfriend, and then bragged about the act to all his friends, the stage was set for a work that would invariably document the moral decline of today’s adolescents.  The disturbing revelation that these kids could wait two days to contact police, bound by in large measure the gang mentality of a mercurial, stoned teenager who incredibly deems loyalty to the apathetic and unappreciative killer should come before informing, makes for a dire commentary on the disintegration of the moral compass, and the utter heartlessness of disaffected and dysfunctional youth without direction or priorities.  In an age when senseless violence – by young gunmen – is often aimed at  schoolchildren, churchgoers and those who are simply in the wrong place at the most inopportune time, we can look back at Broussard’s act and the screenplay Neil Jimenez wrote for Mr. Hunter and conclude that the breakdown chronicled is deep-seeded, with both the killer and his bizarre first protector as soulless perpetrators of a doomed deceit that never even had a remote chance to succeed.  The fact that it was even attempted is unspeakably chilling.

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JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE’S LE SAMOURAI “What kind of a man are you, anyway?”

 © 2015 by James Clark

      David Thomson cherishes Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) for its “… configurations… so mysterious, so averse to everyday explanation;” and he goes on to wrap it up as an everyday bonbon. “Seen now, Le Samourai looks like a film from an earlier age, one made at a time when great films were necessary (and regular) because they demonstrated and fulfilled the nature of the medium.” That’s quite a niggardly pratfall! Not many sentences begin with avant-gardist premises only to flash logical-positivist conclusions. Such conclusions (living in the vicinity of Jean-Luc Godard’s academicism) are copiously pinpointed by Thomson’s last words on the subject, prefaced with passport-to-adulation effete pessimism. “Now that the medium is in ruin or chaos, Le Samourai looks as abstract, yet as beautiful and as endlessly worthy of study, as the Giotto frescoes in the basilica in Assisi. That which seemed fanciful has become an eternal and luminous lesson in how men behaved when they believed behavior mattered.” Such eloquent superficiality should not interfere with our engaging the film Melville in fact offers us, a film-phenomenon (rather than a concept) that has more serious work to do than prettily signing a death certificate for all innovative activity in our time.

There have been myriad endeavors over the fairly recent past stemming from conviction that behavior matters—in fields seemingly so disparate as quantum physics, ontology, architecture, sports and, to name but one more field which at the same time neglects many other efforts, film. None of them, however, has much to recommend in Giotto. Unlike researchers and builders in awe of the innovative lengths to be essayed, the unique human phenomena appearing in grounds-breaking films do not luxuriate in collegial centres. Thomson’s essay includes the alert about our film in the spotlight today (short-circuited, as it happens, to coincide with antiquated stasis), “Everything is in the playing or the enactment.” That is a window on the world which many (Thomson included) harbor a strong impulse to smash. Allowing oneself to babble on about such dynamics without including an iota of what they imply disqualifies one from effectively fathoming what a work like Le Samourai is about.

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