Paranoid Park

Well I did indeed see Paranoid Park.

It seemed more unreal than previous films in a similar vein like Last Days and Elephant. Whilst it continued the tracking shots of people walking and the jigsaw-puzzle narrative that were seen in those films, it added an extra dimension to take one out of the immediate situation. Music nodded to something else, something that wasn't at first obvious. This continued throughout the film. There was always something else to think about, what you were watching wasn't the whole story.

Within in the first few minutes, Alex's narration is abandoned for dreamlike, nearly elegiac camcordered shots of the Paranoid Park skaters. The camera dips and rises with the skaters, moving about at will to the accompaniment of music made from understated French vocals and lo-fi instrumentation. These shots, if not always with the same music, reappear throughout the film, as if a reminder of the purity of skateboarding in Alex's confused and now impure world.

This is a film with multiple narratives, but you wouldn't really say that. It doesn't set them up in the way cineastes expect these days, with the film-maker flitting between the separate strands before bringing them all together at the end. In Paranoid Park they are always just there. Van Sant doesn't make you forget this. Ignore context at your peril.

Van Sant should be, and pretty much is, "down with the kids" now. In his search of Portland for the right kid to play Alex, he's unearthed a performance from Gabe Nevins that captures note perfect those elements of inscrutability, uncertainty and a-shrug-of-the-shoulder insouciance that is - for adults at least - the life of the teenager. It would feel almost like a documentary at times, if it wasn't for the stylised imagery. There is a perfect understatedness to it all. As Alex is being questioned by the police, we don't get histrionic beads of sweat or nervous fingers drumming the table. Alex is relaxed, and only a little change of his story makes anything seem amiss.

There's something about this film I can't quite put my finger on, which I suppose is apt. That's exactly the feeling you have coming out of the cinema. All these little moments that somehow have added up to something much bigger. And yet they're still identifiable as small moments - a shower, a conversation at a skate park, each one is something and nothing. What Gus Van Sant manages here I suppose is to make you aware of the big moments encased in small ones, but to never let you forget that casing. The two exist in parallel.