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Terry Zwigoff's ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL |
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Contributed by Sara Schieron
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Saturday, 15 April 2006 |
ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL is the most recent film by Terry Zwigoff, the
director responsible for GHOSTWORLD and the highly influential
documentary CRUMB. This marks Zwigoff's second cinematic collaboration
with writer Daniel Clowes, who wrote the script for ART SCHOOL
CONFIDENTIAL based on his 4-page graphic novel of the same name. |
The film's protagonist is Jerome Platz. An aspiring artist and victim
of public school bullies, Platz illustrates elaborate revenge fantasies
and exuberantly reports on the life of Picasso, the artist who embodies
his aspirations for success, accomplishment, fame and promiscuous sex.
When the time comes for Platz to graduate from high school, he sees the
prestigious Strathmore Institute as the gilded path to his golden goal.
A fantasy itself, the Strathmore institute bears little resemblance to
its brochure. Littered with refuse and populated with every art school
stereotype conceivable, the school and the events that befall Platz are
outlandish and ironical jabs at the farce that is art and arts
education - though admittedly, the satire does not stop there. On, what
feels like a narrative tangent, we learn that Platz has arrived at
Strathmore just as the campus is under the threat of the "Strathmore
Strangler", a serial killer who preys upon students and employees of
Strathmore. The strangler roams the school campus, building his own
desperate, destructive, but nevertheless effecting, kind of art.
Ultimately, the one aspect of film that isn't a big stuffed finger
pointing at the clichés of art is in fact, a big stuffed finger
pointing at the clichés of film.
Different in many ways from its shorter, more distilled namesake, the
film does follow in Zwigoff's tradition of mundane absurdity and mild
offense, however, as opposed to subverting our expectations (as he did
with drunken, pissing, Thornton as BAD SANTA or with the ambiguous,
anti-Golightly Thora Birch in GHOST WORLD), he plays upon expectations;
exploiting stereotypes that become self-fulfilling prophesies in a
context where originality is supposed to be the ultimate goal.
Ironically, this story of youth and its search for inspiration, fame
and sex ends tersely at the beginning of the third act, when the story
grows sinister and seems to forget itself as a comedy.
The lightheartedness of the first two acts is not only charming it's
beautiful; displaying a brand of wistful nihilism consistent with
Zwigoff's other work. That old "this world is unified by chaos" feeling
is not a sad approach - it's as comical as anything else. This sweet
addressing of the absurdity of it all makes the later turn for the dark
side a somewhat surprising twist, which could explain why the film is
enduring such mixed reviews. This act three mood-shift seems like a
deliberate tactic, not an accident, and that alone makes it worthwhile
grist for the "Zwigoff as auteur" mill. CRUMB, GHOST WORLD and BAD
SANTA took dark turns. At the beginning of the third act CRUMB begins
the discussion of Crumb's work as pornography, Birch and Buscemi get
disquietingly intimate, and Tony Cox playing the elfin thief fatally
pins Bernie Mac between two cars.
Efficiently written and beguilingly conceived, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL
is fantastically inclusive about the paradoxes of art and in so being,
refuses immunity in the discussion of those paradoxes: the result is
the film deliberately and honestly points that big stuffed finger at
itself. Somehow, parody seems the sincerest form of artifice. |
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