vernon film society
Bringing the best in world and Canadian film to film lovers of Vernon and the North Okanagan
ELEPHANTCountry: USA "Gripping and superbly made." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
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| An ordinary high school day. Except that it's not.
“Van Sant gives no pat or easy answers. Instead he makes us squirm, worry, and think. That's why Elephant is a must-see movie. " – Christian Science Monitor |
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ELEPHANT, the film which won both the Palme D’Or
and the prize for Best Director at the 2003 Cannes Film
Festival, fits perfectly into Gus Van Sant’s (TO
DIE FOR, GERRY, GOOD WILL HUNTING) oeuvre - like
all his other films it is radically different than anything
he has done before. The title comes from Alan Clarke’s
BBC film of the same name that attempted to explore
the unfathomable complexity of the strife in Northern
Ireland, suggesting the problem was as difficult to
ignore as an elephant in a living room. In Van Sant’s
film, the dilemma is the kind of Columbine-style high-school
massacre that has become a chillingly familiar event
in the United States. Using non-professional actors,
who improvise the dialogue based on their actual experiences,
ELEPHANT captures the hopeless routine of an
apparently ordinary day at a modern, middle-class, predominantly
white high school. It’s a beautiful fall day.
The day is filled with class work, football, gossip
and socializing. For each of the students we meet, high
school is a different experience: stimulating, friendly,
traumatic, lonely, hard, oppressive. Snatches of conversation,
random gestures, high spirits and adolescent suffering
accumulate as frag-ments, impressions and observations,
while the camera glides dreamily over the gleaming floors
and through the unadorned institutional hallways. When
the violence erupts, it does so with a visual restraint
that is as clean as the polished corridors. No bullet
sprays, blood squibs, exploding flesh or graphic deaths
crank up the emotional impact; these shootings are as
ordinary as tossing a football on a lawn, or cafeteria
gossip. The film rigorously eschews the attempts at
revelation that are the stock-in-trade of conventional
social problem films, such as personal psychologizing,
ominous foreshadowing or facile explanations. The video
game the kids play isn’t particularly violent
and there are no signs of child abuse or hideous dark
motivations. There are no easy answers here and Van
Sant offers none. This is perhaps the greatest strength
of this riveting, controversial film.