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Ezra Miller as schoolboy Robert |
Candid look at cameras turned on us
AFTERSCHOOL
Directed by Antonio Campos
Certificate 18
THE miniaturisation of camera technology has, in a few short years, changed the way we look at the world. We are all under surveillance, be it from CCTV or from the camera phones we all carry. And with the internet available to ping your images around the world in moments, you have an easy way to distribute your footage: the voyeur can be instantly satisfied.
What this means, and the effect it can have, is the topic of this story of an adolescent boy, Robert, who captures the deaths of two classmates on camera.
The setting is an elite American east-coast boarding school.
Robert and his friends have privileged backgrounds and their school provides a happy and safe environment.
Theirs is, in the words of the director, an abnormally sheltered and safe existence. But this is turned upside down when their haven is undermined by the sudden and violent deaths of two of their alumni. The victims become memorialised as part of a school project to help heal the grief. But the assignment has unexpected side-effects.
Director Antonio Campos is a 25-year-old New Yorker who has made a variety of short films, well received at film festivals. This is his first feature-length film and he shows himself to be both thoughtful and adventurous in his direction.
The movie’s backdrop looks at the wave of amateur film footage now available – Campos considers the rise of the internet as a means to distribute your own films, be it “citizen journalism” when you capture an incident on a mobile phone, or straightforward voyeurism, provided by sites like YouTube.
For Campos, this means a break from what he dubs “MTV-style teen films”, which rely on rapid cutting from one shot to another, and a blaring soundtrack.
“It takes away from the experience because it feels so cluttered,” he states.
Instead he wanted to use a more simple style, where distractions were at a minimum. It adds to the sense of spying on something you shouldn’t really be party to, as does Campos’s love of odd angles, using the camera at times as the eyes of the cast, as opposed to a window for the audience to peer through.
It gives a general sense of unease throughout: we watch little things happening off stage, as it were. You see in the background a couple snogging. There’s a TV blaring. You eavesdrop on a conversation between two people that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot.
This odd feeling is kicked off right from the start, as the opening scenes begin with a mixture of YouTube-style oddities, such as BMX bikers having humorous accidents, through to footage of Saddam Hussein being hanged, and some sexually graphic conversations that can be found on nasty websites. It immediately makes you feel damned uncomfortable, and this sense of things not being quite right continues throughout. This young film-maker has managed to create exactly why we all feel the heebie-jeebies when we sense we are being watched, and though this film is uncomfortable viewing, he has achieved what he set out to do. |
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