Kaboom by Gregg Araki

Four years ago in Cannes, the world was ending with a bang, not a whimper. This year, it’s even bigger: the termination of everything takes place in one gigantic Kaboom. The parallel between Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Gregg Araki’s latest feature seems strangely logical. These two young American directors set loose generations of cinephiles, in love with their cartoon-like hopeless characters carried by TV stars and dreamlike atmospheres. Their presence at the Cannes Film Festival is a sign of the times. Emblematic of a deranged twenty-first century lost in infinite possibilities, the two movies mix third degree and real tragedy in a happy mess wherein time travel and living hallucinations are part of the usual set.

Far from the disastrous Cannes showing of Southland Tales which condemned it to a hushed late release, Kaboom was one of two Midnight Screenings, certainly a more appropriate land for this echo of Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy. In the early nineties, the young filmmaker was dealing with American youth with a desperate craziness and astonishing sensitivity, recycling all the various patterns of his country – road-movie, love story, sex, drugs & rock’n’roll. Since then, Araki has made a breakthrough amongst intellectual critics, impressed by the sober maturity of Mysterious Skin, the sweet yet harsh chronicle of two boys raped during their childhood. And more than ten years after the ironically-named Nowhere, Kaboom clearly refers to the trilogy that made him well-known. Nowhere was a “Beverly Hills, 90210 episode on acid” in which Ryan Philippe, Heather Graham, Denise Richards, Christina Applegate, Mena Suvari and Scott Caan partied and encountered a killer extra-terrestrial lizard. A decade later, things have gotten even worst.

On a high school campus, the favourite set of American youth adventures, Smith shares a room with a living homosexual fantasy called Thor, meets his best friend to talk about their sexual encounters, watches a red-haired girl being attacked by guys wearing animal masks, dreams of a lesbian witch, and falls in love with a blonde libertine chick. That’s the way it is in Araki’s world. Everything is possible, so don’t be surprised if the final minutes of the movie make your brain explode with so much nonsense – this is the main thing Kaboom shares with Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (screened at the Critics’ Week), besides Roxane Mesquida.

It’s easy but tempting to list the familiar elements of Smith’s journey: Smiley Face’s space-cake hallucinations, Splendor’s outdated romanticism, Doom Generation’s sexual violence, Nowhere’s sweet absurdity, and even Mysterious Skin’s sense of family. Time has passed, James Duval and Gregg Araki are both older, yet clearly this doesn’t mean anything. The young boy in love with Rose McGowan in The Doom Generation - also seen as the apocalyptic rabbit in Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, in another uncanny coincidence - is now an undercover secret agent. And the director controls colours, sounds, and editing with the same know-how. Deeply attentive to his world, he seems to call up tomorrow’s faces in his mind trip with the same energy he had years ago. Juno Temple has never been offered the opportunity to be so deliciously sexy, Thomas Dekker escapes from Heroes and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles to show some tenderness, and even if the others are mostly here for their unique faces, we can only agree on director’s tastes. In a Gregg Araki movie, each shot, each encounter, each set seems to offer you a choice. Merrily dive into a unique experience - sometimes absurd, occasionally tragic, and definitely euphoric - or categorically reject a breed of violent director who is tired of boring movies. It’s up to you, but be careful: you could regret it.

By Geoffrey Crété