Cold Water

COLD WATER   ***1/2

Olivier Assayas

1994

IDEA:  Two disaffected teenage lovers seek escape from their stifling home lives.

BLURB:  Coming after arid scenes of parental harangue and institutional-social malaise, the centerpiece sequence of Cold Water, a euphoric party-into-the-night scored to Janis Joplin, CCR, and Bob Dylan, arrives like an earthquake. It is a jolt to the film’s and spectator’s systems, a seismic affective shift that erupts the restless adolescent energy that had previously been conspicuously subdued. Assayas’s camera, channeling this unshackling, weaves through the exultant teenage revelers in breathlessly unbroken takes, making the scene as much about joyous release as one of exorbitant, distended time. Yet even as it marks a pronounced tonal departure, Assayas is careful not to make the party into a wish-fulfillment fantasy. As it transpires in its indulgent duration, the pleasurable feeling of jouissance becomes gradually subsumed by a sense of inertia and futility. Parents come searching for their daughter, briefly but unsuccessfully restoring narrative progress; the jukebox of songs furnishing the sensory experience begins to sound rote; the systematic destruction of the squalid building housing the party, and the blazing bonfire, seem more like signifiers of a danse macabre than a celebratory escape. And after the haze of disenchantment sets in the next morning, as it must, Assayas launches his final and most austere stretch, in which freedom and futurity itself dissolve into vaguer and vaguer ideas. Cold Water is a powerful bottling of teenage discontent and that desperate urge to find somewhere – anywhere – that might be more accommodating.