Van Sant’s latest addition to his canon of films dealing with youth in crisis may well be the apogee of his career. Many elements of the director’s previous work, such as the adoption of a non-professional cast and the deliberate discrepancy between sound and visual tracks, are maintained here, but these rudiments converge to awesome effect in ‘Paranoid Park’. Undoubtedly, Christopher Doyle’s signature cinematographic style contributes a significant formal element to the film by complimenting the director’s abiding fascination with the beautiful awkwardness and poignant transience of youth; long tracking shots are interspersed with slow-motion Super 8 footage of skateboarders that put the adolescent body through a cinematic ceremony revealing a quasi-balletic quality that reminds us that these are bodies fundamentally in transition. However, it is the director’s uncanny ability to visually map the teenage rituals invoked to deal with or mask immense pain that remains in the viewer’s mind long after viewing the film and confirms him as one of the genuine auteurs of American cinema. A scene of breakdown, rendered poetically through the use of an expressionistic soundtrack and tight close-up, is a particularly memorable moment. If this isn’t teen art, then I don’t know what is.
