Afterschool (2008) Reviews

• A piece of undelivered promise

  Hail-the-Eraser2010-06-04

  Though it undoubtedly bears promise, this is a film which will test your patience like few others. The film is slow-paced, which one could argue is a way for Campos to build further isolation from the main character, yet fails to depict anything interesting in its entire running time. The characters are all cardboard-thin, save for the protagonist whose loneliness and eccentricity is apparent yet inaccessible. Believe me, I tried to feel some sort of emotional connection with him, but never achieved much except a strong yearning to fast forward the film through conversations that initially felt pointless and ultimately proved to be so. If Campos can take his skills of plot-structuring and possibly add more dialog to further reveal other aspects of his characters, then I strongly believe he has the potential to make an excellent film, but I just found this one to be an inaccessible drag.

• Coming of age in the YouTube generation

  Chris Knipp2008-09-22

  The 24-year-old Campos has been winning prizes for his short films for the past eight years; started film-making at thirteen and completed his first short film at seventeen; has been a Presidential Scholar; and wrote the script for this film at the Cannes Residence in Paris in fall 2006. It premiered at the 2008 Cannes Un Certain Regard series. Campos, who was a scholarship student at an exclusive international school himself and then went to study film at NYU, has been rejected from many festivals, but Cannes has led him to the NYFF. He has a group of friends and associates from NYU, and has founded Borderline Films. (See the interview "Filmstock: Antonio Campos 'After School'" on PlumTV.) 'Afterschool,' which speaks of a boy and girl in a fancy East Coas prep school video club, of the boy's roommate, and the death of twin Alpha Girl classmates, is a film of and about the YouTube generation. It begins with Rob (Ezra Miller) watching an online porn site called "Nasty Cum Holes" (or something like that) in which a man, unseen, is talking dirty to a young prostitute. Rob is in his dorm room, which he shares with Dave (Jeremy Allen White), who deals drugs. The video club links him with Amy (Addison Timlin), with whom he loses his virginity. While ostensibly making a sort of promotional video for the school he is shooting a hallway and stairway and all of a sudden two twin girls, the most admired in the school as it happens, appear overdosing. Robert rushes down the hall to them and the camera continues to watch as he sits on the floor with them as they die. Links between all this and Michael Haneke's 'Caché' and Van Sant's 'Elephant' are almost too obvious to mention. In what follows there is a lot that shows the hypocrisy and confusion of the teachers, the headmaster, and the kids. Rob is so full of emotion throughout the entire film that he finds himself almost completely shut down. Mr. Wiseman the therapist or counselor (Lee Wilkof) succeeds in getting him to open up a tiny bit by trading obscene insults with him. (Campos' admiration for Frederick Wiseman's 'High School' led him to pay homage with the character's name.) A lot of 'Afterschool' is seen either as a video camera (or even a cell phone camera) see it, or as Rob sees it. When his lit teacher is talking about 'Hamlet,' he is watching her crotch, legs, and cleavage and that's what the camera sees. At other times the camera is fixed and one speaker is cut out of the picture, or you see only the edge of his head. Campos is not of the shaky, hand-held school of realism. His evocation of the sensibility of his young characters goes deeper than that. When kids today see something like a girlfight (or a boyfight) at school, somebody films it, and when it's filmed it's going to wind up on the Internet. There's a girlfight Rob and his roommate watch on the Web and then they're in a boyfight with each other in which Rob lets out his sudden pent up anger. Maybe his roommate is guilty in the twin girls' death. But as the school headmaster somewhat facilely says, maybe they all are. A wave of repression follows the incident--perhaps evoking the aftermath of 9/11, which Campos interchanged with the girls' death to get kids' reaction shots. Campos likes moments that make us and himself uncomfortable, starting with the opening porn video, but continuing with Rob's experience and the world seen through his eyes. (Campos made a short film in which a young girl sells her virginity on eBay and loses it for real on camera to an older man.) Rob's safety is continually compromised and his emotions are uncertain. He doesn't know who he is, and neither does the filmmaker. Rob is a cleancut, even beautiful, boy, but he is almost clinically shut down--not an unusual state for a male teenager, maybe even more likely in a privileged setting like a New England prep school. Rob and Amy are assigned the task of making a 'memorial film' about the dead twins. However the film he makes is too abstract, existential, ironic and just plain crude to be acceptable. When his supervisor sees it he thinks it's meant to be a mean joke. Later a more sweetened up and conventional version of the film is shown to the whole school, which we also see. Altering and re-editing reality is a continual theme of 'Afterschool.' As Deborah Young of 'Hollywood Reporter' writes, 'Afterschool' "is a sophisticated stylistic exercise too rarefied for wide audiences, but earmarked for critical kudos." It may seem in the watching more crude than it is. The cobbled-together vernacular images are clumsy, but the filmmaker is supple, deft, and sophisticated technically and bold intellectually--still-beyond his years. He has also captured a world he himself knows personally with rather stunning accuracy. (Note: I am not sure of all the characters' names and may have got some identifications wrong here.)

• Mercury Vapor

  tieman642010-11-07

  "I think I may not be a good person." - Robert Antonio Campos directs "Afterschool", an ambitious film which owes a little bit too much to the works of Haneke, Kubrick and Dumont. The plot: at a private boarding school, an alienated teenager (Robert) watches as two older girls die due to the ingestion of drugs contaminated with rat poison. Rather than call for help, Robert simply walks over to the girls and watches as they pass away. This is all caught on a video camera, though as Robert's back is turned to the camera we don't see him suffocating to death (or does he?) one of the girls. The camera itself was present simply because Robert was shooting a school project, which he later abandons in favour for making a video memorial of the girls who died. Due to the presence of drugs on campus, as well as the deaths of the two girls, the school puts in place a harsh, disciplinary policy. Robert's video memorial is itself censored for being too probing and curious, rather than one dimentionally commemorative of the dead girls. The film then ends with two scenes. One in which children receive pills from a school nurse, and another in which Robert is in a library being spied on by an invisible camera. The film uses a variety of distancing effects, none of which resonate. In the hands of the directors I previously mentioned, these techniques work, but Campos is a novice and his attempts at forcing a sense of Brechtian distance seem pretentious and shine little light on the themes being explored. If the film is amateurish, Campos' sense of genuine curiosity, as well as the worthy themes being explored, nevertheless demand that this film be taken seriously. Forget the fact that the film has only one visually interesting sequence – a brilliant opening in which Robert sits in darkness, his head framed by the glow of a computer screen as he watches pornography – and focus instead on the ideas being addressed. Robert, who is addicted to the internet and obsessed with images, is concerned about whether or not he is a "good person". He confesses to a guidance counsellor that he is desensitised to both pornography and violence and reveals that he is fascinated only by the "real". Indeed, when watching a certain piece of pornography, Robert is interested only in that fleeting moment in which the actress is strangled, terrified and so drops her "fake" "porn star persona". What Robert has realised is that everything is an image, everyone wears a mask, and that only at the moment of violence does something authentic tend to slip into view. As such, with childlike curiosity, Robert strangles his girlfriend and forces one of the dying girls to gag on blood. He wants to peek beneath the mask. This is not to say that "violence" is more "real" than other human behaviour, but rather, that all desire has a violent element. As everyone from Freud to Lacan shows, desire and the death-drive are intertwined; in an attempt to satiate desire, the self seeks to transcend the flesh and move toward pain and then outright annihilation (of the Self or Other). What the film thus does is link this "search for the Real" with, not only the fact that everything and everyone is now an unreal image, our 21stC world a participatory data-bank of pixel-like fragments to be consumed, digitised and digested, but the realisation that the equivalency of all things under the gaze of New Media leads only to the derrealization of a world which can now only be transcended (ie felt) through Kubrickean ultra-violence. Many have dismissed Robert as a psycho. But like Alex in Kubrick's " Clockwork Orange", the point is that Robert is the only one questioning the world around him. Robert rapes, has sex, indulges in violence and engages in all manners of "dark" things by proxy (using the internet and film), and yet during the death of the "twin" girls (another Kubrickean allusion) he is the only person who steps out of the camera and into the real, where he touches their dying bodies. "Why didn't you do something?" adults ask Robert in relation to the dying girls. "Are you serious?" adults ask Robert in relation to his probing video about their death. But though everyone dismisses Robert, he is precisely the only person who "does something" and is "serious". When he makes a movie which seeks to investigate the lives of the "twins", reconciling their outward angelic beauty and their need for drugs, their "unified image" and their "fragmented reality", he is thinking about, considering, and questioning his own ethical stance in relation to things. Significantly, the film ends with Robert in a library. He seems to have escaped the internet, trading the allure of images for his writings and books. He seems to be a "changed subject", able to integrate video images with a tactile life which touches rather than freezes all in the moment of the (machinic) vision. But this moment of uplift is undercut by the film's final image, in which Robert is spied on by an invisible mobile phone camera. Sadly, Robert the artist now epitomises the trauma of 21stC reality, living life like an image, an isolated shard within the mediated universe. What the film says is not only that the young are ill equipped to navigate the ethics of today, but that being equipped to today is itself unethical. Beyond this the film touches upon other themes - disaffection, alienation, the spread of pornography and mediated violence, the way everyone is now "medicated" in one way or the other, the fact that adults are unaware of the radical (and dark) social changes which teens and kids are facing, hypocrisy, a viewing-obsessed youth culture etc – though only faintly. 7.9/10 – Interesting.

• Well made but really dull and far from the font of wisdom it thinks it is

  dbborroughs2009-10-04

  I'm trying to figure out why this was shown at last years New York Film Festival. At the same time I'm so incredibly happy that I didn't see it there and over paid for the privilege to watch paint dry. The plot of the film has an internet addicted teen at a prep school who is so disconnected with the world that the only thing real is what he sees in the You Tube clips or through his video recorder accidentally record the drug overdose of two of the girls in the school. We then watch as events play out. Long dull shots framed off kilter so as to cut off peoples heads combine together to reveal a story about teen life that is so artificial that you'd have to have limited exposure to either children or the films about them to truly be shocked at revelations. Alienation? Who would have thought? Drug Use? Amazing.Adults that are condescending and don't listen? Who knew? I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. When the overdose occurs, I'm not sure how long into the film, a good distance, I was bored so my sense of time was all screwed up, I figured that the film would pick up. It really didn't. Honestly they sort of lost me with the opening montage of viral clips. One instantly got a sense of where it was going and what the filmmakers were going to be saying and the film didn't disappoint. I thought for awhile that the off kilter camera was always from the hero's point of view and then I realized that not, his head was chopped off sometimes too. Sometimes you wonder why a film can play something as prestigious as the New York Film Festival and not get a distribution deal or one that delays the release for a year or more, thats not the case here, its clear why no one picked it up, its dull and far from revealing. As I said at the outset the real question is how this dull little film ended up in any film festival at all.

• Afterschool(2008) 2/5

  teg50372011-03-29

  Critics who have been comparing Campos to Kubrick and Van Sant must owe him a favor.This film was not the worst movie I have ever seen,it just could of been so much better. I did not mind the slow pace. I did not mind any of the acting,it just didn't deliver with the story. I thought this movie was building up to some climax that I wouldn't see coming: *SPOILER* it doesn't. *SPOILER* Sure, it showed him possibly choking out one of the twins, but I had more expectations that. *SPOILER* Why didn't he rat out his douche bag roommate for possibly supplying the drugs, or why didn't he rat out the school after the counselor told him that the school knew the twins were drug fiends and had problems. Also, *SPOILER* the memorial video he made was stupid. It really was. I thought it would of been better if he exposed the twins as druggies and somehow managed to pile in information to show that the school knew and didn't do anything about it. Instead, it was a horrible clip of people staring, almost like he was stalking them . Like I said before, I didn't mind the slow pace, but Jesus, it's gotta build to something. Some positives about this film were how they showed the curiosity of teenagers and sex, how Campos took a modern direction with twisted teens in today's society and technology, and how awkward it can be to live with a roommate you hate.Ill finish off with saying this: If you find yourself halfway through this movie and you are not enjoying it, do yourself a favor and turn it off...you won't miss anything.