Afterschool

AFTERSCHOOL   ***

Antonio Campos

2008

IDEA:  While working on a film project at his private boarding school, a disturbed student happens to capture on camera two students dying of a drug overdose.

BLURB:  There’s something to be said for a film that executes and studiously maintains a methodical, cohesive formal scheme. In Afterschool, Campos and DP Jody Lee Lipes use wide, frequently static shots, unbalanced framing, and blocking that often obfuscates characters to convey a world of pervasive, screen-mediated and -distorted gazes. It is an aesthetic of detachment and acedia that enters into productive conversation with the amateur video footage shot by Robert (Ezra Miller). While the lensing of the film itself is stately and fastidious in comparison, its penchant for chopping figures off at the edges of the frame - as well as its uncanny mixture of vérité-like observation and affectedly simulated “reality” - establishes a congruity with the rougher, consumer-made digital videos it seems to contrast with. The effect, as tends to be the case with such meta-cinematic voyeuristic explorations, is an implication of the spectator’s own scopic drive in a media landscape where reality and representation blur. Is Afterschool, as its title might suggest, just another clichéd, facile, and reactionary diagnosis of the sociopathy of Internet-weaned youth? Is it, as its aesthetic would suggest, just another mannered, dourly self-regarding knockoff of Michael Haneke? Honestly, yes and yes. But Campos’ stylistic devices are still transfixing and expressive, and his sly contextualization of the film’s events within a Bush-era milieu of proliferating paranoia, government abuse, and publicized state violence gives potent layers to what might otherwise be a shallow new-media diatribe. Nobody will mistake it for subtle or nuanced, but Afterschool is a visually nifty directorial debut, and an aptly chilling sketch of a culture numbed to its own tragedies.