Ken Park

Laura's Half-Arsed Film Review #2

The other night I watched a Larry Clark film I borrowed off my fabulous brother Ken Park (2002) (That is, of course the name of the film. I don't normally follow my relatives name with a date. My brother's name is Harry by the way. I also have a sister called Angela. Anyway, back to the review). You may know Larry Clark from other films such as Kids (1995) and Bully (2001). I didn't, before this film I was a Larry Clark virgin. But now I am a convert.

Ken Park follows the lives of four teenagers, actually, when I say follow it's more of a prolonged snapshot. It presents these characters to the audience via an examination of their relationship to sex. There is a male youth (I struggled whether to call him boy, young man, guy, and settled on this rather affected term) who is cheating on his girlfriend with her married mother. Another who's father can only understand love in terms of acts of violence and sexual perversion. A sociopath with a three-legged dog who plays skip rope with the neighbourhood kids. And a girl who is living under the oppressive shadow of her dead mother that her deeply religious father has created. Book-ending these lives is of course the eponymous Ken Park. But I won't tell you what happens to him, just watch it.

The characters are contradictory and as a result satisfying and likable. Clark presents these unlikely events with an impressive amount of plausibility. And it ends with a thought-provoking, although some may deem pretentious and unnecessary, reflection on a utopian society. Immediately after viewing I thought I would probably have got more out of this film had I watched it in my teens, and undoubtedly this is a market that this film (and perhaps Clark in general, I don't know, as I say I'm quite ignorant of him) caters for. But on reflection it is a film I feel I would like to return to, if only to revisit its characters. Thoroughly recommended.