Teen Tales
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen TEEN TALES BY ROBERT ASAHINA Anyone who has survived adolescence can tell you that it is no joke. Though growing pains may not be fatal, they can scar you for life. But you would never...
...Nonetheless, Homework displays at least some appreciation of the bewildering array of adolescents' temptations and possibilities, along with the emotional consequences...
...True, this is basically a T-and-A exploitation film, allegedly in more ways than one...
...He scorns his brother's ac-commodationist politics, comes of age sexually with Magda's enthusiastic help, and joins Pierre first in a rampage of vandalism and then in a plan to escape to the West...
...Dillon's equally restrained performance convinces us we're watching a real teenager (which he is) rather than one of those overage actors straining to pass for a high schooler...
...In private, he subsequently tells the boy why he didn't alert the authorities and also why it was wrong to have and sell the pictures...
...Still, they are undeniably there—no small matter, since adults, who figure prominently in the lives and certainly in the complaints of real teenagers, are usually improbably absent in the affairs of their reel counterparts...
...As we see in a flashback under the credits, one man who fled the country after the 1956 uprising left behind his wife and two young sons...
...More important, Homework does dignify its subjects with some messy and thereby convincing complexity...
...He suffers more than just that...
...the two boys can barely keep the refrigerator stocked and the heat on in their rickety farm house...
...The social roles of sex and love, the political reverberations of rock and roll, the cultural ramifications of shucking a school tie and blazer for long hair and a leather jacket—all are explored here...
...Even so, it has been a while since any American film has disclosed a similar awareness that sex is simply one of the travails we suffer while growing up...
...The larger world is hermetically sealed out by Amy Heckerling, whose nuts-and-bolts direction gives the enterprise a made-for-television look...
...Its "star," Joan Collins, has charged that a soft-core sequence supposedly showing her in the nude was actually shot with a stand-in, and that she and her co-star, Carrie Snodgress, have been misrepresented in the advertising campaign...
...Bycontrast.FaW Times at Ridgemont High utterly lacks any notion of cause and effect...
...And an insecure boy is smitten with impotence, a rare ailment on screen...
...A pouty-faced girl (marvelously portrayed by someone named Shell Kepler) dreams of being a singer, engineers a private session with a sleazy record producer and winds up first in his bed and then with a case of gonorrhea...
...No doubt the emphasis on flesh and fornication is supposed to be commercial...
...The film is set in 1963...
...But you would never know that from most of the films being made for and about teenagers...
...Nevertheless, Tex is struggling realistically with recognizable adolescent difficulties...
...In the welter of slowly mounting political tension, sexual liberation and social unrest, the music of Elvis Presley and (by the end of the film) the Beatles acts as a catalyst to Denes' inchoate sense of self...
...Partly at fault is the screenplay, adapted by Cameron Crowe from his book of the same title...
...the door to the West has been opened acrack, just enough to let in such potentially disruptive forces as rock and roll...
...Mitigating all this, though, is the fact that ambiguities are actually appropriate to the complexities of the historical period and of adolescence...
...The film's appeal results from the seeming familiarity of the title character, one of those proverbial diamonds destined to remain in the rough...
...Far from being sardonically detached...
...Some sensitivity to adolescent angst, surprisingly, went into Homework...
...yet despite, or possibly owing to, such restraint it netted piles of money...
...What lends it some interest is the way Crowe's deadpan writing casts the gossip, tangled romances, minor rebellions against authority, and other Sturm and Drang of high school days in an ironic light...
...Except for superficial up-datings of the music, sexual customs, clothes, and cars, Fast Times could have as easily been set 30 years ago...
...A slight liberalization by the regime is having unexpected results...
...The elder, Gabor (Henrik Pauer), is trying to get into medical school and meeting some resistance because of his father's past...
...Maybe so, for Collins and Snodgress certainly play minor roles...
...Few adults (and no parents) clutter the landscape...
...Denes' teacher (Jozef Kroner) has already found the photos and hidden them...
...Pornography debases love, he explains, making it subject to the kind of political control evident in the schoolroom raid...
...His report of his experiences is a novelistic collage of reconstructed dialogue and impressions...
...Without the context of Crowe's descriptive passages, the dialogue and the bare bones of the action are totally banal...
...In fact, more happens to Tex during a few weeks than usually befalls the most luckless teenager during several years...
...His girlfriend's nouveau riche father (Ben Johnson) disapproves of him, his horse is sold by his brother to buy groceries, he falls in with a small-time drug dealer, and he discovers that the rodeo clown isn't really his father...
...In addition, the unpredictability of the plot lifts the film well above the realm of a sentimental soap opera...
...Hin-ton novel it is drawn from, but the be-lievability of the individual scenes is undercut somewhat by the improbability of the entire story...
...The skimpy story of The Beach Girls (the title says it all), for example, is the slenderest pretext for baring the obvious assets of a bevy of overendowed, undertalented starlets...
...Not everything in teen-age life has to turn out so unhappily, of course...
...More important, Time Stands Still is the first movie I can remember where political and social issues make as much of a genuine difference in the teenage characters' lives as they do in reality...
...Some of these are little more than today's versions of the beach blanket romps that featured Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands two decades ago?the same mindless plots and characters done with less skittishness about sex...
...better look at teenage troubles comes from Hungary via the New York Film Festival: Time Stands Still, written (with Geza Beremenyi) and directed by Peter Gothar...
...A sharper talent is evident in Tex, possibly the first recent Disney production to appear at a New York Film Festival (this year's concluded last month) and to attract more attention in Manhattan than in the sticks...
...Magda and Gabor are apparently married, while Pierre has apparently disappeared...
...Instead of leering, the filmmakers demonstrated an understanding that the chief concern of teenagers is growing up...
...When the film begins, the boys are seven years older and in high school...
...The screenplay by Charlie Haas and Tim Hunter is no doubt simply following the S.E...
...Fast Times at Ridgemont High is affectless: The characters behave like zombies...
...For all that these vexations are often expressed in erotic terms, the idea that teenagers are obsessed with mere sex is a fantasy of middle age...
...It is worth noting, therefore, that American Graffiti, perhaps the best Hollywood effort about high school life, boasted no nudity or explict sex...
...An urgent desire to establish an identity apart from one's family, an uncomfortable loneliness along with the desperate wish for peer approval, plus frustration at finding one's feelings, needs and thoughts out of synch—these are among the problems that loom largest during adolescence...
...This perspective is absent from the film...
...The younger, Denes (Istvan Znamenak), finds himself drawn to a rebellious older student, Pierre (Sandor Soth), and an aggressive girl, Magda(Aniko Ivan...
...A boy watches his best friend steal "his" girl and then takes her back, as if nothing happened...
...His resentment of Mason for applying to an out-of-state college, his absurd idolizing of his no-account father and his desperate classroom shenanigans have an authentic feel under Hunter's low-key direction...
...at the same time, love is something that no philosophy or regime can refute...
...His mind is preoccupied with using his new-found abilities to pop open girls' sweaters...
...perhaps it will even inspire a comedy series (as American Graffiti did Happy Days...
...Indeed, this one will probably wind up on the tube shortly...
...He and his brother, Mason (Jim Metzler), have been virtually abandoned by their father (Bill McKinney), a shiftless rodeo clown...
...Unlike, say, the protagonist in Breaking Away, Tex (Matt Dillon) is a kid who is going to be left behind—and Bixby, Oklahoma, is about as behind as you can get...
...After he finished college, Crowe, a young (and young-looking) Rolling Stone writer, spent a year "undercover" at a Southern California high school...
...he is now a soldier on drunken leave...
...I say "apparently" because many things in the film, not merely the ending, are unclear...
...A JL...
...Thedrama of growing up, however farcical at times, is always played against the backdrop of the larger culture...
...Revealing glimpses of what Hollywood believes is on the minds of adolescent moviegoers can be found in Going All the Way, a film that makes back seat fumblings seem more depressing and pathetic than they really are...
...Denes has been selling stolen pornographic pictures to his schoolmates, and their circulation has provoked a chilling search of his classroom by the assistant headmaster (Adam Rajhona), a Party operative...
...Gothar's literate and ambitious script is very untidy...
...Small wonder that Tex has what's called a "discipline problem" in school...
...Or in Zapped, starring television's Scott Baio as a high school whiz kid who brews a magic potion that gives him telekinetic powers...
...Moreover, virtually everything takes place in a vacuum, or rather an enclosed shopping mall (perhaps the same thing...
...A girl gives up her virginity, becomes pregnant, loses her boyfriend, and then undergoes an abortion without registering any more anxiety than a snail would...
...One episode is particularly expressive of the rich texture of Time Stands Still...
...Later we see the lesson slowly sink in as he tries to adjust to the responsibilities of maturity and (relative) freedom...
...Perhaps their larger significance is highlighted in Time Stands Still because of the dark background of a repressive government...
...In a brief coda set on the eve of 1968?that fateful year for Eastern Europe?we learn how little circumstances have changed after all...
...Because all Denes seems to have on his mind is Magda, this speech adds to his confusion initially...
...Denes never left the country...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 20
