Paranoid Park

Alex (Gabe Nevins) says he wasn't there. And the cop (Dan Liu) doesn't have much reason not to believe him. He's not a bad kid; there's no indication he'd get mixed up in something like this. There is the matter of the witness who saw someone throwing a skateboard off the bridge that night - and Alex has a new board. But that's no crime, even if it's possible that the dead man was struck with a wooden object.

Alex says he didn't go to the skateboard park that night, but he doesn't have a witness to corroborate his story. He was alone.

He does seem troubled though. His parents are splitting up so he has every right to be. He's realising he isn't really into his girlfriend either - though she's keen to take it to the next level. He's not sure what he's got himself into or who he could talk to about it. The truth might hurt too much. Much easier to get back on his board and fly.

A kind of companion piece to Gus Van Sant's Cannes-winning (and much criticized) Elephant, this is another high school horror show, but this time our sympathies are much more likely to rest with the innocent teenager who somehow winds up with blood on his hands.

Adapting a teen fiction novel by fellow Portland, Oregon writer Blake Nelson, Van Sant presents the movie as a subjective, looping stream of consciousness story as Alex tries to make sense of his experiences in a diary form.

This is a more accessible movie than the long-take immersions Gerry and Last Days, though like them Paranoid Park has a jumbled chronology, with some scenes repeated in different forms; there's also a similar mode of grungy inarticulacy; and the soundtrack put together by Van Sant's collaborator Leslie Schatz is wildly experimental, ranging from birdcalls to Beethoven, Elliott Smith to Nino Rota. (It works great.)

This time there is a strong narrative thread, and Van Sant doesn't hold Alex at arm's length. We're invited to share in his confusion of innocence and guilt. Super 8 imagery of skateboarding carries a palpable romantic tilt - more expressive than anything in Dogtown and Z Boys.

Van Sant cast the kids from Facebook, which is both a good thing and bad. Unlike most Hollywood teen films, these kids look their age and act it. They also have more interesting faces and the kind of bodies you find outside of Los Angeles modeling agencies. But the performances are also awkward and self-conscious - not that these qualities are alien to most adolescents, but this is the crudest element in what is for the most part a spellbinding movie.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com