Streetwise

STREETWISE   ***1/2

Martin Bell

1984

IDEA:  A document of youth living on the streets in Seattle in the early-to-mid 80s.

BLURB:  In its gritty yet poetic vérité aesthetic, fragmentary storytelling, and non-moralizing sociological eye, Streetwise exemplifies an idiom of filmmaking that has become ubiquitous in chronicling the lives of the urban dispossessed. It also has roots in the traditions of neorealism and ethnography, in which the line between exploitation and empathy tends to get shrouded in difficult-to-disentangle problems of ethics, aesthetics, and structures of power. Streetwise in many ways amplifies the questions around these issues; how, for instance, did the filmmakers navigate the legal terrain of filming minors, many of whom likely didn’t understand the consequences of broadcasting their frequently self-incriminating behavior? It’s startling to witness these kids stealing and prostituting themselves, a feeling that stems not only from the reality of the situation, but from the fact that Bell, McCall, and Mark had the permission to capture it on screen. To their enormous credit, they neither condemn nor romanticize the kids’ marginalized existences, nor do they succumb to the temptation to psychoanalyze them. Letting their subjects narrate their own stories with a mix of vulnerability and bravado, they create a nuanced, moving portrait of makeshift community and survival, of youth claiming agency against the odds. They have palpable love for the charismatic, scarily self-possessed kids, not their circumstances; they admire their daring, cunning, and even their posturing belligerence because they understand how critical these qualities are as tools of endurance. Rather than try to facilely answer for the ethical questions inherent in its premise, Streetwise embraces what is thorny, discomfiting, and unavoidably sad about a reality that isn’t amenable to easy solutions.