"Nobody's ever ready for Paranoid Park."
The story attached to a young skateboarder guy's, Alex's point of view, more precise to his memories about that fatal night on the seventeenth, when a security guard died (killed?) in Portland's industrial district, right next to the Paranoid Park. Let me explain the informations of this sentence: The "Park" is a place for skateboarders (built illegally by themselves) and all the inherent subcultural figures. When I said that the happenings on the screen follow Alex's memories it was a deliberate choice of words: He remembers through his diary written during the flow of the film. And - as well trained cinephiles we exactly know - our memories, our remembering is more subjective than how the things happened in reality. And along the police's investigation and Alex's growing pricks of conscience the reality can't resist to appear...
I like the expression which perfectly fits here is the Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal's term to describe this way of subjective storytelling. She is talking about the "innocent chronology", where the storyteller who - usually because of his/her guilty feeling's repression - tries to "forget", who tries to convince even his/herself how the past exactly happened - not like in reality. Bal is talking about the innocent chronology in connection with Robbe-Grillet's novel, Le Voyeur's (The Voyeur) protagonist, the travelling salesman who tells a strange murder story "forgetting" mentioning that actually he was the murder. The same narrative game (and a murder case) is played in Attila Janisch's genious spiral-structured Másnap (The Day After Before) as well where the protagonist's narration jumps back and forth in time just to avoid his facing with the pregnant point of the story, the moment of the murder.
Alex: "I had tried to put this part out of my mind. But Lu's picture brought it all back."
Gus van Sant is coming from this direction when gives a diary into his protagonist's hands, where the diary will be the helping tool of the confession. Alex claims he isn't the best in creative writing, but the weakness of the storytelling is not his fault: van Sant seemingly gives the responsibility to him, but the Paranoid Park remains his weak film. After Harmony Korine's or Larry Clark's much much powerful, authentical and effective films about the contemporary America's generational apathy this movie - especially in 2008 - doesn't give anything else to the topic. The soundtrack is the bravest step from the film (I still don't get the point why van Sant used frequently Nino Rota's tunes from Fellini's Giulietta degli spiriti), but if you're shooting skateboarders the super8-like, fisheye-quality of camerawork is nothing more but a huge commonplace cliché. For this it was really unnecessary ask Christopher Doyle to hold the camera...
Van Sant still didn't convince me about his favourized talent (the only significant film from him is still My Own Private Idaho, from 1991(!)).
Sorry, but won't lie to you: forget it. Instead of this watch Kids, Gummo, Bully, Ken Park (another park?), and the rest.
5/10
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