Kids (1995)

	Directed by: Larry Clark	COUNTRY USA GENRE Drama NORWEGIAN TITLE Kids RUNNING TIME 93 minutes
	Produced by: Cathy Konrad Cary Woods
	Written by: Harmony Korine

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Telly	Leo Fitzpatrick
Casper	Justin Pierce	½
Jennie	Chloë Sevigny
Ruby	Rosario Dawson	½
Steven	Jon Abrahams
Harold	Harold Hunter
Fidget	Harmony Korine
Darcy	Yakira Peguero

Review

Wanting to make a film about contemporary youth culture, photographer and underground documentarian Larry Clark was roaming the streets of New York during the early 1990s when he met the young, aspiring writer Harmony Korine. Clark asked Korine to write a script for him, and the result was this story about a colourful yet largely homogenous group of irresponsible teenagers who, during a hot summer day, roam the streets of New York fuelled by the desire to have sex and get high. The film was met with plenty of moralising criticism, since its main thematic line is the young lead character's sexual encounters (or rather, his hunt for virgins). For this criticism to be valid, however, one would have to argue that Clark fronted his themes in an exploitative manner, and so the critics argued exactly that. Their mistake was to confuse Telly's exploitation with Clark's – not an uncommon error by critics who fail to consider the work they're analysing from a wider perspective.

Seen today, with the benefit of nearly twenty years' hindsight, the merit of Kids still remains, and the film has stood the test of time well. Its strengths can be summed up in three points. The first is the authenticity of Korine's script. His understanding of the characters he writes is the hallmark of someone reporting from the inside; he knows what it was like to be a teenager in New York City at the time, and how they acted and interacted. He may not have known why they did so, but that is of secondary importance here.

The second point is the semi-documentarian feel Clark achieved, owing to a combination of Korine's script, Clark's own background in similar environments, and his decision to populate the film with real people from the communities he depicts. Leo Fitzpatrick, Justin Pierce, Rosario Dawson, and Chloë Sevigny were all discovered by Clark and/or Korine in New York City, and although they were largely untrained, their closeness to the characters and situations made their performances remarkably real.

The third and final point is the warmth and lack of judgement in Clark's direction. Although Kids can be seen as social criticism, it is really more of a social commentary. Clark's version of New York is a warm and friendly place occasionally ravaged by chaos. Admittedly, he points out the meaninglessness and brutality these kids experience and inflict, and the catastrophic consequences this can have. But there's a youthful vitality and a hint of optimism in everything they do – a sense of joie de vivre which, claims Clark, they do not extinguish themselves, but that the ravages of time and the eventual disappointments of lower-class urban adulthood will inevitably kill off.