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Whatever
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One often hears that the problem with teen movies is their relative lack of serious focus on the growing pains of women. The claim is not entirely true – there are plenty of terrific girl-centred teen films, even if you have to search long and hard in the video shops for them – but it serves to give an aura of novelty and provocation to Susan Skoog's debut feature, Whatever. Anna (Liza Weil) is an intense, sulky teen with latent artistic potential. Her days and nights are filled with the usual horrors of a mundane, working class life – dysfunctional family, irrelevant high school curriculum, few job prospects and a pretty unfulfilling social schedule. Nonetheless, there's always the booze, the drugs, the parties and some tentative sexual exploration to conjure dim avenues of escape. In a time-honoured tradition, Anna has a best friend, Brenda (Chad Morgan), who is her opposite number in most respects. Where Anna is plain, shy and thoughtful, Brenda is trashily glamorous, gregarious and "out there". Like many a teen movie, Skoog's portrait gilds the wildness of youth with an ever-present sense of sadness, ennui and waste. Whatever is about vicious circles and impossible dreams – and yet it does not entirely dispense with hope. The film's qualities of mood – especially its evocation of American suburbia in the early 1980s – are more successful than its actual narrative. Some of the characters flitting through this mosaic are strange and unique, but others are pure movie cliché – like the beaming, hippie teacher (Frederic Forrest) who tries to help Anna enrol in a New York art school. While the film's title suggests a nod towards the no-future nihilism of the Punk movement – backed up by tracks from The Ramones and Siouxsie and the Banshees – its sensibility is finally more middle-of-the-road. Ultimately, it is a typical rites-of-passage tale dressed up in a little tough realism – but that modicum of directness certainly raises it above such mediocre teen entertainments as Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 (1998). © Adrian Martin November 1998 |
