Cast: Alex Frost, John Robinson

Director: Gus Van Sant

Screenplay: Gus Van Sant

Running time: 1 hr 21 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


At the sight of Elephant, one could inevitably surmise a dreadful sigh of ‘not another American high school movie’. Not blameworthy, the poster illustrates a picture of a blonde lad receiving a girl’s kiss with the words ‘an ordinary high school day’ just below it. Surely a winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes circa 2003 could not be so average, not in the hands of Gus Van Sant. Not your common Hollywood director, Van Sant picks up the John Hughes school-teens guidebook, swathes it with a Brian De Palma élan minus the glorified violence, and mounts an über-indie picture that socially and spatially explores the incongruence of youth-life via fragmented, yet interlinked, Tarantino narrative. But still this remains a very Van Sant affair: lingering, tracking shots of its multiple-strand characters, from a yellow-haired eccentric with a father-issue to a sport jock to the awkward, bespectacled misfit, characters walk through corridors and the dark, morally-grimy story unfolds. Just when clichés start to form, Van Sant relentlessly shoves them back down by intercutting a shot of a darkening sky, almost portentous to the heart of its subject matter: teenage violence. Yes, its title only serves as a MacGuffin (Elephant refers to an idiom about an ‘elephant in the room’, which means ‘truth that is ignored’). The culprits are shot in a very ordinary environment, two teenagers who decides to bring guns into school and indulge in a shooting spree. Whilst based on the Columbine High School Massacre, this story is told without pretentions, no reasons, and deliberately fragmented the whole egregious event to capture the delirious, unexplained matter of the tragedy. In fact, Van Sant barely props character backgrounds to explain these two culprits’ social psychology, and rather gives us snippets of hints: bullied at class, possessed with classical music, video-game shooting and possibly with homosexual issues (these two guys share both a snog and a shower). Whereupon these aspects do not necessarily fit together, Van Sant never explains why. Perhaps even these characters are beyond his comprehension, making Elephant a perplexing study on what causes our youth of today to go wayward.


VERDICT:

More arthouse filmmaking, an exercise on style, narrative and time continuum – that explains why this is not your average ‘American high school movie’. Elephant draws a massive divide on its audience, but undeniably remains a provocative pseudo-realistic indictment on the American gun-culture and teenage violence.



RATING: A-