STANLEY KAUFFMANN ON FILMS: YOUNG PEOPLE AND OTHERS
by Stanley Kauffmann
There’s a unique situation today in film–internationally. Films about young people–say, those under 30–are being made by people under 30. Many such films have been made lately in America, and they have also come from numerous European countries, from Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan. Compare that fact with, for instance, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Wild One (1954), made by directors who were 44 and 47, respectively.
True, in the late 1960s we got a clutch of “youth” films, some of them by newcomers, but they were patent studio moves to cash in on the temper of the times. Most of them affected me like the sight of gray-haired people at discos. Those films were leagues–generations–apart from the youth films arriving today, some of which seem to have almost an encoded air: in some degree, they seem to depend on generational recognitions.
Chasing Amy (Miramax) is one such. This is the third film by Kevin Smith, now 26, about young men and women in New York and the New Jersey suburbs. His people here are aging–they’re pushing 30–but in dress, talk, interests, ambitions, they still seem emblematic of their decade. I didn’t see Smith’s first two films, Clerks and Mallrats, but I understand that Chasing Amy is a sort of continuation; and I also understand that, though I knew what was going on all the time, and cared about it, I wasn’t really getting it all.
His three principals are in the comic-book business, not Superman stuff but comics targeted for their generation. Two men, played by Ben Affleck and Jason Lee, are collaborators; a young woman, Joey Lauren Adams, works on her own. Affleck meets Adams in a club, is attracted, then very soon discovers that she’s a lesbian. Nonetheless he continues to be attracted, and she in time responds. No slightest suggestion is made that Affleck is “saving” Adams from lesbianism: it’s sheer persistence, and it touches her.
Difficulties follow. Items from Adams’s past are dug up by others and make trouble. After some rough spots, an ending arrives, hopeful but not guaranteed happy. There is no Amy in the film. Lee, in one of Affleck’s bad patches, tells his friend of a mistake he once made with an Amy and how, figuratively, he has been chasing her ever since. The point is not lost on Affleck.
Smith gives his film a nice feeling of joint enterprise. It’s as if some young people got together, including Smith, and decided to explore this subject while a camera rolled. Affleck and Lee are limber–moody and high-flying–and Adams is like a human weather map as she continues to discover herself sexually.
One aspect strikes a viewer who is a bit over 30. A lot in the dialogue–and there is a lot of it–is about self and self-fulfillment in love or sex or both. This is not strange in a love-and-sex story (nor is the pungent diction); still, I couldn’t help remembering that a comparable story in the 1960s would have included some reference to matters other than self-satisfaction.
But Smith makes it crackle, with various aggressive honesties and wit. Instance: Affleck and Adams have a loud scorching argument in the stands at a hockey game, then storm out. A fellow in a nearby seat who has been listening intently turns to a friend and says: “I told you these were good seats.”