Initially banned, the movie Kids finally opens in South Africa this Friday. Our critics offer their views on the film’s bold director and its young star
Charl Blignaut
SUNDAY night and Sandton Cinema 8 is packed. The tall, thin film-maker stands up front, having been called up to introduce his movie, apparently uneasy in front of so many people. The microphone stand is set too low and he has to stoop. The audience waits expectantly as he settles into an uneasy slouch. You wouldn’t tell by looking at him that Larry Clark, now 54 years old, hair in a ponytail and dressed casually in black, is one of the most controversial film-makers of the Nineties.
Then again, what exactly does a controversial film-maker look like? All the hype around his teen sex slacker classic Kids seems to have had some local media expecting to see him come out dressed in a devil suit with little horns sprouting from his skull. “So, do you think he’s a dirty old man?” is a question thrown at me several times during the run-up to the premiere. For God’s sake, get over it, I keep wanting to say. This whole freak-out about teen sex is out of hand. A lot of kids do it, OK? Believe me. I, for one, had sex before I was 16. And if you don’t believe me, look at South Africa’s HIV statistics. 16- to 25-year-olds. That’s the core group infected — and getting younger all the time.
As it turns out, Clark is a calm, slightly shy individual who charms the opening night crowd with a brief hello followed by a modest acknowledgement of Harmony Korine, the 19- year-old screenwriter who told Clark he wanted to write movies and who Clark commissioned to write Kids “so the story could come from the inside, from the point of view of the kids”.
What strikes one about the movie — detailing, as it does, 24 hours in the lives of a New York skateboard/nightclub crowd of teens — is its energy; at first latent, then bursting into frenetic spurts of action and emotion with all the clattering force of a skater wiping out down a flight of concrete stairs. Shot over six weeks in the summer of 1994, there was no time to mess around.
“I tell you, I had to move to keep up with the kids,” says Clark, a glint in his eye, when I meet him for an interview on Monday morning. “I had to learn how to skate.”
The film was also a liberation for the director of photography, Eric Edwards, who’s been in charge of camera on the likes of Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and To Die For. For Edwards it was a treat to take the camera himself and to be able to shoot images sometimes so rough that, in more conventional hands, they would have ended up on the cutting room floor. Clark is quick to share the credit for Kids with Edwards and his editor, Chris Tellefson.
Using the city as backdrop, Kids asks us to become immersed in the crowd, albeit a specific crowd. Identities blur amid a group of multi-cultural characters. Yet the real power of the film is not the urban backdrop; it’s the magic playground that the city becomes. Says Clark: “It’s a realistic film about what’s going on when kids have their own world. It’s a private world and adults are not allowed in … I was granted access to that world.”
And, having been granted access, Clark acts as voyeur, as detached observer. He is, after all, best known as a photographer. That so many South African critics have walked around muttering about it being a dodgy type of voyeurism probably has to do with the fact that, once inside the scene, Clark refrains from comment; refuses to demonise or romanticise the gritty realities of the kids’ lives. And, let’s face it, an HIV-positive teenage boy having unprotected sex with virgins (even though he isn’t aware of his HIV status) is gritty. And it’s real. This is a real crowd of kids, not actors landing roles after auditions. And this kind of shit goes down in real life. Clark’s saying it’s time to face up to it. That’s why the Society for Family Health pitched in and lobbied for the unbanning of the movie in South Africa. That’s why they co-hosted the premiere with the South African distributors, Anant Singh’s Videovision. That’s why parents, and not just their kids, should go and watch the film.
No doubt audiences will come away rattled. I sure as hell did. But for my money, a sense of unease is a huge relief in a vast sea of cosy, feelgood American pictures with neatly wrapped edges and clear moral conclusions. Clark never has been and never will be part of the mainstream. There’s a line he loves to throw at interviewers when asked about the content of his next film project: “Let me put it this way, Kids was my commercial movie.” The planned project is, incidentally, the film version of Eddie Little’s as yet unpublished novel Another Day in Paradise.
But that’s Larry Clark, documenter of America’s teenage sex and drug wasteland in books of photography such as Tulsa (1971), Teenage Lust (1983), and The Perfect Childhood (1991). Still with us after all those years of self-confessed substance abuse. At some point during the interview he reminds me of Bill Burroughs, the drug novelist and literary outlaw. “There’s justice for the wicked,” I comment. “Yeah,” he chuckles, “I think it must be my genes … Like Keith Richards. So many people died trying to be like Keith Richards.” Before I know it, the half hour interview is over and a video crew is waiting their turn.
“Man, I feel like it’s my first day back on the job,” sighs Clark when I meet up with him for a drink before dinner that night. He is visibly exhausted after a day of intense interviews. From 9am until 8pm he has been subjected to a rigorous bombardment of notepads, tape recorders, video cameras and radio microphones. He’d stopped travelling with Kids almost a year ago, having defended his moral and artistic decisions all around the world. He decided to visit South Africa to see a country that has always fascinated him and spend some time with his 13-year-old son more than to try and sell his movie.
But, as in Britain, a certain sector of the South African public and media has grilled him, determined to prove that he is — at best — some sort of pervert and — at worst — promoting unsafe sex. This may well have to do with the movie’s ending, with there being no punishment for the “wicked”. But few seem to realise that the old wagging finger of paternalism frightens younger viewers off. Clark maintains over and over again that he identifies a moral core at the centre of the film: “Play with fire and you’ll get the bill.” I feel that the pain of the HIV situation as seen by the look in the infected Jennie’s eyes as she travels downtown in a taxi says more than a thousand safer sex booklets.
At dinner, Clark comes across as a slightly withdrawn, yet inquisitive individual with a host of questions to ask about South Africa. There’s no trace of the ego or arrogance you might expect from someone who has made one of the great movies of the Nineties. His exasperation lifts slightly as those present try to fill him in on South Africa’s dazzling history of sexual oppression, of the Aids situation, the lack of sex education, the need for the debate that Kids has brought to town …
The next day he’s heading for Cape Town. He’s hoping to get to the beach and then visit Durban and spend a day in a game reserve before he leaves the country. You can’t help feeling the man deserves all the peace he can get.