LLGFF: Kaboom

KABOOM
Directed by Gregg Araki, 2010

Writing this whilst feeling like I’m dying - or possibly passed away in the night - gives some indication of how enjoyable the BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival gala night party was. Free wine… Boys… Drag-queen nuns… What more could anyone ask for? Shame then that Araki’s Kaboom, the gala screening, was diabolical.

To clarify, I won a place as a ‘young reporter’ at the festival - and thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to flash my cupcake-emblazoned pass around and generally act as if I owned the place. As for the festival itself, I’m not really a team player when it comes to the LGBT community, but, at the risk of sounding completely like the festival’s butt-boy, there was a palpable sense of, well, community at the screening – in fact, all night. There was a welcoming, inclusive atmosphere and it was rather lovely. Double shame then that Kaboom was diabolical.

I suppose I should clarify that… I’m all for the idea of wanton nonsense, big bright trashy fun, but, for me, nothing sat quite right enough in this ‘teen sex/end of the world/murder mystery comedy’ for the film to work on those terms. I’m not sure how comparable it is (especially not on budgetary terms) but Kaboom doesn’t have a fraction of the demented, madcap energy of, say, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (a film which when it comes to pop-cultural nonsense is going to be a high-benchmark for the foreseeable). Even Tarantino’s Death Proof, though a deeply ridiculous film, traffics in the same sort of knowing-wink-to-the-audience pulp trash as this, but has a control which is almost entirely lacking here. Overall I can’t shake the impression of a filmmaker attempting to return to his glory days, but with considerably diminishing returns.

I’m not a massive fan of Araki anyway, I concede, though I do absolutely love Mysterious Skin, which I think is a highly impressive and mature work – all the more so for being by the director of Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere. Though sharing some of Mysterious Skin’s atmospherics, Kaboom totally fails to capitalise on the control and poise of Araki’s command of the material there. Though this is a very different kettle of fish – a deliberately outré college romp-cum-thriller (I use the word ‘cum’ advisedly) versus Mysterious Skin’s psychologically delicate story of two damaged, abused boys – there’s no reason why the precision he brought to that previous film should be mutually exclusive with the content in this one.

(Oh, apparently, directly before this, he made one about “a young woman who has a series of misadventures after eating a large number of cupcakes laced with cannabis”. Dear god. At least no-one must’ve seen that one - but the chances of Araki becoming some kind of elder statesman of queer cinema is looking more and more unlikely.)

In regressing to the punkish style of his earlier films – but with considerably less energy and DIY brio – Araki risks sliding into middle-aged irrelevance, not unlike John Waters’ mid-career slump into a kind of mainstream and thoroughly sanded-down version of his own initial style. To be honest, the aforementioned ‘Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy’ – to which this is very definitely an adjunct (hammered home by the presence of those films’ star, James Duval) – were pretty shit to begin with, as far as I’m concerned. The only one I particularly recall any of is The Doom Generation, with its tinfoil-covered bar, penis tattooed with Jesus, and climactic amputation of Duval’s character’s (Jesus-less) cock.

Before the screening, the director (who seems very nice - so, you know… sorry) said something to the effect of wanting Kaboom to be an equivalent of those earlier films for the current generation of teenagers – but I can’t help wondering if they’d just find it cringeworthy. Some half-baked horror clichés combined with what’s essentially a below-par episode of Skins – well, put that way, maybe it will find an audience (though whether it’d be the one depicted in the film is questionable). The take on promiscuous teen sex here smacks you in the face with the fact that the film’s creator hasn’t been a teenager for a very long time, and, worst of all, simply feels pointless. (Larry Clark might still be peddling teen ‘relations’ in his late sixties, but at least he’s never made anything this cringy.)

Then there’s the contrived bitchy insults which Rose McGowan somehow made work in The Doom Generation, but which fall horribly flat coming from the mouth of Haley Bennett. There’s a similar line in sexual innuendoes, though supposedly candidly direct lines of the ‘I just want to make you come’ variety are possibly more painful.  Almost without exception the cast are pretty but dull, with the badly fake-tanned lead coming across as a kind of twinkified Jason Schwartzman. With awful hair.

Oh, my – the litany continues: the scene transitions. Christ, the scene transitions, which utilise every effect short of star-wipes. I’m not even 100% about Kurosawa’s hard-edged wipes, but is this even allowed?! Even with heavy irony. Actually, especially not when irony is involved. These sort of elements would lead to the spoof reading which some of my illustrious colleagues on the Young Reporter programme were leaning towards, but I don’t buy it. Even if that was the intention, the conspiracy elements were played relatively straight, but maybe needed to be more heightened… or less, I can’t tell, too hungover.

In the interests of some spurious balance, I will say that – perhaps strangely, considering it was the opening feature at a gay film festival – Araki’s approach to fluidity in sexuality was quite laudable and welcome (I certainly wouldn’t categorise this as an out-and-out gay film), though it did also smack a little of a Torchwood-style EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IS SEXUALLY AMBIGUOUS setup. That’s particularly interesting as the discussion we’ve been having in relation to the festival has centred on the continued relevance of festivals of this kind (they still are, yes), and whether mainstream or alternative films are better vehicles for homosexual content (they’re not mutually exclusive), so a film that breaks down a lot of those boundaries, and without making much of a fuss about it, is quite apposite.

But, really, you know a film’s got problems when its whole plot needs to be explained with a massive infodump - and that’s before you get to the perfunctory and wannabe-nihilistic (insert lacklustre spoiler warning here) destruction of the earth ending.

Anyhoo - I’ll be reviewing all the films we get to see at the festival, so watch this space, innit.