91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳

Kids
Directed by Larry Clark
Screening at Hoyts Cinemas
Reviewed by Bernard Wunsch and Nick Everett "Vicious, anti-woman, child-sex film", was how Phillip Young, coordinator of the Project Family Group, branded this debut by film maker Larry Clark in Brisbane's Courier-Mail. Kids, he claims, is symptomatic of the "cancer of moral decline" and like Pulp Fiction and Priest (the connection escapes us) is "poisoning our culture". So what is so bad about Kids to justify an "R" (18+) rating from government censors and outrage by conservative and religious groups? Kids tells it like it is. The film deals with youth issues such as sexual relations, drug use and youth culture. Clark, who has gained notoriety for his photography, captures the lives of New York urban youth in a semi-documentary style. The film was scripted by 19-year-old skater Harmony Korine, and the kids who take part in the film are not actors but youth from the streets of New York. The result is a realistic film that is not easy to watch because it shows poverty and alienation in all their rawness: ugly truths about violence, rape, sexism and drug abuse that young people have to confront. The story, set on a hot summer day, revolves around two teenagers, Telly and Jenny, and their immediate friends. Telly and his friend Casper are young skaters who "hang out", take drugs and party. Telly's only ambition in life is to convince virgins to have sex with him and then leave them. The first part of the film leads us to a gathering of guys whom Telly, and an already drunken Casper, come to visit. They begin to talk about sex, and then the film cuts to a conversation, also about sex, amongst some of their female peers. One of these, Jenny, one of Telly's former virgins, goes with her friend to a clinic, where she discovers she has contracted HIV from Telly. Jenny sets out to inform Telly he has HIV. The audience is struck by the inability of many of these characters to make informed decisions, and to think beyond "having a good time", eventually with tragic consequences. "The film offers no solution", as Phillip Young point out. But what is more fundamental about this film is that it reveals not a moral decline, but rather the social decay and dislocation endemic to US capitalism, a system which is denying a future to its youth. On display in this film are antisocial values — homophobia and sexism — that we hoped might have more in common with the 1950s. This film is not a contribution to the destruction of young people's lives, but a mirror with which to look at the challenge that confronts us: the challenge to build a society in which we can express ourselves without fear of violence, and in particular violence against women. It is a pity this mirror must be hidden from the eyes of under-18s, who could at least relate to and perhaps learn from what it has to show them.