Film

Paranoid Park

Cert: 15

Description: Sixteen-year-old schoolboy Alex is alienated from his soon-to-be-divorced parents and frustrated by his failing romance with classmate Jennifer. Visiting the titular skateboarding hangout with his best friend Jared, Alex heads for the local railroad tracks to ride a train; a seemingly harmless escapade, which leads to the accidental death of a security guard. As Alex wrestles with his guilt, local cop Detective Lu begins to question the local boys about their whereabouts that fateful night.

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Martha De Lacey, London Lite

Dir: Gus Van Sant.

Cast: Gabe Nevins, Dan Liu, Jake Miller

Country: US.

Year: 2007.

Duration: 84mins

Teenage traumas

Guilt-edged: Gabe Nevins as schoolboy skateboarder Alex

By Derek Malcolm
27 Dec 2007

This strange story from Gus Van Sant, made with a cast of amateurs from Portland, Oregon, is about an accident resulting in death and the guilt of the skate-boarding high-school boy who unwittingly caused it. Beautifully shot by Chris Doyle and Ran Kathy Li, it is shot largely in the local skate park, where the boy and his friends spend time.

Van Sant manages to make a small elegy about adolescence out of a film which in other hands might have become a slightly grisly thriller.

Interview: Gus Van Sant

Gabe Nevins plays Alex, the boy in question, and we learn from his diary what happened before seeing it for ourselves. He has accompanied an older skater on a freight-train ride. Chased by a security guard, he fends him off with his skateboard only to see him fall back on the track and get run over by an oncoming train. The man is cut completely in half.

Alex and his friend Macy (Lauren McKinney) try to work out what to do and how to deal with an accident which seems to make him both killer and victim. This is a film which appeals to the senses rather than the brain, and it works despite some uncertain acting.