Afterschool
Director: Antonio Campos

Inglourious Basterds
Director: Quentin Tarantino

This is quite a week for American enfants terribles, old and new. Falling firmly into the latter category is Antonio Campos, a New Yorker of Brazilian/Italian parentage who single-handedly wrote, directed and edited his debut feature Afterschool at 23 (he's now 25). Auteurs are getting younger these days, of course: Quebecois prodigy Xavier Dolan was 19 when he directed, wrote, produced and starred in I Killed My Mother, a prize-winner at Cannes in May, while Iranian 21-year-old from Hana Makhmalbaf debuted at 15 with Joy of Madness (2003). As Francis Ford Coppola – a sometime precocious wunderkind himself – famously put it, "One day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart."
   Indeed, one of America's leading film-critics, Mike D'Angelo, ranks Afterschool his number three film of the decade, ahead of works by Lars Von Trier, Carlos Reygadas, David Mamet and Wong Kar-Wai: "Sorrowfully observing the quest for something real in a terrain of orchestrated lies, Afterschool never once flinches. This is how we live."
   While respecting D'Angelo's verdicts, I can't endorse his encomium this time. From my perspective Afterschool –  in which Robert (Ezra Miller), a troubled teenager at a fancy prep school, happens to catch on camera the drug-related death of two pupils while working on a video-project –  is a classic example of debutant-overreach.
   Campos deserves credit for tackling major issues of contemporary American society – most notably the way (also explored by Michael Haneke's Hidden) that technology is producing a de-sensitised generation which experiences life at one or two removes. But the unsettling, bracingly glacial poise of his direction is repeatedly let down by some basic, distracting lapses in storytelling logic and plausibility. In addition, there's something score-settling and lazy – reactionary, even – about the way his script presents the school's teachers ("you're inherently good kids") and pastoral-care counsellors ("we can always do medication") as sanctimonious, well-meaning, hopelessly ineffectual liberal boobs.
   It's hard enough to direct a debut film at any age – but Afterschool gives the impression that Campos could have profited from greater outside help during script-development, and it would probably have been a good idea if he'd handed over editing-duties to more experienced set of hands. Interesting that the major area of responsibility which he did delegate to a collaborator is the cinematography – and first-timer Jody Lee Lipes (now 27) emerges as the name to watch from Afterschool.
   His limpid widescreen images here balance on the tricky edge between hyper-realism and hallucinatory intensity – and his visually superb follow-up, artworld documentary Brock Enright – Good Times Will Never Be the Same (which Lipes also directed), strengthens the suspicion that he's a truly outstanding "DoP"in the making.

Enfant terrible numero deux this week is Quentin Tarantino, no longer exactly a young buck at 46 but still exuding a certain youthful, rockstar-like charisma. Astonishingly, half a decade has passed since the second helping of Kill Bill - and Tarantino spent most of that time working on his follow-up. Or rather, working out what the project, Inglourious Basterds, was going to be: at various stages this tale of derring-do behind enemy lines during World War II might have become a novel, or even a TV mini-series.
  Tarantino finally completed the script in July 2008, and the movie, with all its complicated logistics, was completed in time for its premiere at Cannes in May. It's not uncommon for a long gestation-period to be followed by a frenzied, against-the-clock production – but the results can often be wayward. Inglourious Basterds (misspelling intentional) is a case in point. Tarantino has had creative carte blanche since Pulp Fiction and the results have been (predictably) indisciplined. Even 1997's Jackie Brown, still perhaps his most satisfying work, had no real reason to run 2 1/2 hours.
   Inglourious Basterds is similarly lengthy and unwieldy, and should either have been trimmed down to manageable length or bifurcated, Kill-Bill-style. Tarantino juggles several plot-lines and sets of characters, including the 'Basterds' themselves, a Jewish Nazi-killing platoon in occupied France led by southern-fried bootlegger Aldo "The Apache" Raine (Brad Pitt, broad); a tragic heroine, Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent, slightly colourless), who survives a family-massacre to run a Paris cinema and plot revenge; a British film-critic (Michael Fassbender) dispatched by Churchill (Rod Taylor) to execute a 'Operation Kino'; plus various nefarious representatives of the Third Reich, most prominently SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz).
   Structured as a series of chapters – most of them featuring very long dialogue scenes (mainly in subtitled German) – the script's various strands climax at Shoshana's cinema during the premiere of a Nazi propaganda epic. By this point the 'Basterds' have become unobtrusive  supporting characters in their own film, which is increasingly dominated by Waltz's silkily sophisticated Landa. The previously little-known Austrian – a veteran of German-language TV and theatre – was named Best Actor at Cannes, and is indeed by some way the best thing about the whole rickety enterprise.
   If only Tarantino had been able to exert Waltz's controlled precision! Alas, the tone veers wildly from scene to scene, even within scenes, so that we end up with a kind of 'Allo 'Allo if directed by an out-of-form Jean-Pierre Melville. How ironic that a movie which is so monotonously concerned with reputation (Landa and Raine talk of little else) should itself emanate from a film-maker whose flashy public image has almost subsumed his considerable talents.

Neil Young
11th August, 2009
writtren for the 19th August edition of Tribune magazine

AFTERSCHOOL : [5/10] : USA 2008 : Antonio CAMPOS : 107m (BBFC) : seen at Kino Vic, Ljubljana, 14th November 2008 – Ljubljana International Film Festival (public show – complimentary ticket). Original festival-report.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS : [6/10] : USA (/Ger/Fr) 2009 : Quentin TARANTINO : 153m (BBFC) : seen at The Motion Picture Company screening-room, London, 4th August 2009 (press show) – with thanks to Tim Robey