美国少年American Teen (2008)英文影评

“American Teen” is populated by high school archetypes, kids who might have stepped out of the mists of your own adolescence or, if you’ve managed to suppress those memories, out of other teen movies, from the canonical works of John Hughes to, um, “Not Another Teen Movie.”

There is the blond popular girl, Megan Krizmanich, and her blond sidekick, Ali Wikalinska, young women who wield inordinate power over the social fates of their peers. There is Colin Clemens, the basketball star hoping to land a college scholarship and facing pressure at home from his ex-athlete dad. There is Hannah Bailey, the artsy misfit girl who dreams of becoming a filmmaker and who enters into a transgressive romance with a dimple-chinned athlete named Mitch Reinholt. And there is also Jake Tusing, a self-identified nerd with a bad haircut, serious acne and a heavy video-game habit.

They are all helpfully labeled on the film’s Web site — Princess, Jock, Rebel, Heartthrob and Geek — and then shoehorned into a series of senior-year narratives, each one turning on a predictable but nonetheless gripping question. Will the popular girl get her comeuppance, or see the error of her ways? Will the geek get a date for the prom? Will it work out between the arty girl and her mismatched beau? Will the team win the big game?

Not everything works out according to the teen movie formula. There are some odd developments and unexpected reversals — a trip to Tijuana, a breakup via text message — to complicate the anticipated narrative arc. There are moments of breathtaking cruelty, unguarded emotion and plain weirdness. And there are some genuinely scary turns, as when Hannah, brutally dumped by the boyfriend before Mitch, falls into a depression so severe that she can’t bring herself to go to school.

But the real twist is that all the characters in “American Teen” are real people, students in Warsaw, Ind., discovered by Nanette Burstein and arrayed in her fascinating, queasy-making new documentary. The fascination comes from how unguarded these young people seem to be about their own lives, speaking frankly to the camera and allowing it to observe uncomfortable and intimate moments in their lives. The queasiness, inevitably, arises from the same source.

It goes without saying that a documentary film that finds non-famous, non-adult people at an especially vulnerable crux in their lives is something of an ethical minefield. Can a filmmaker investigate the ual, emotional and family lives of innocent youngsters without slipping into exploitation? The easy answer, confirmed by “American Teen,” is no way. And why even try? In a project like this one, the line between sympathy and prurience is not so much thin as nonexistent. Once we know a little about how these kids think, interact and behave, we are caught between the hunger to know everything and the impulse to look away before we learn too much.

Not that Ms. Burstein shows us anything explicit, shocking or even especially surprising. “American Teen” includes some swearing, drinking and smoking, a lot of vicious gossip and a smattering of talk, but nothing likely to feed the cultural appetite for panic at the spectacle of kids gone wrong. What might make an older viewer feel a little squeamish is that the Warsaw High seniors seem almost completely undefended, without the sense of shame or privacy that might protect them from our prying eyes. Even when they are wearing microphones, few of them display much visible self-consciousness or discomfort. You might almost think they were acting out scenes rather than just living their lives.

And in a way they are, and not only because some of the dramatic moments Ms. Burstein captures feel as if they might have been rehearsed. Adolescence has more than its share of built-in drama, and high school can resemble an endless series of auditions, performances and soap opera episodes. But the members of the class of 2006, to which the subjects of in “American Teen” belong, are part of a generation whose media-saturated lives make Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan look positively naïve. Ms. Burstein’s presence, invisible and unremarked upon, is in a way almost redundant in the era of Facebook, YouTube and reality television. These kids were toddlers when MTV first aired “The Real World,” and being on camera, or online, is another way of being themselves.

The contrivances of “American Teen” — the animated sequences, the arrangement of chaotic events into coherent story lines, the withholding of information to increase the impact of its disclosure — become tokens of authenticity. This is the kind of movie the people in it might have made, which means that its revelatory power as an investigation of teenage life in America is limited. It tweaks but does not entirely satisfy your desire to see the alleged typicality of the Warsaw High seniors deepened into a source of social insight. Matters of class come up only obliquely, and parents are largely in the shadows, and when they emerge they are reliably clueless, bumbling and unsympathetic. They have the double disadvantage of being grown-ups in a teen movie and of being, compared with their children, less intuitively aware of what it means to parade before the camera, on screen, living an ordinary American life.

“American Teen” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It depicts or refers to teenage drinking, smoking, and swearing.

AMERICAN TEEN

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Nanette Burstein; directors of photography, Laela Kilbourn, Wolfgang Held and Robert Hanna; edited by Mary Manhardt, Tom Haneke and Ms. Burstein; music by Michael Penn; produced by Ms. Burstein, Jordan Roberts, Eli Gonda and Chris Huddleston; released by Paramount Vantage. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

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