Post subject: Alles Naar De Klote / Wasted (1996)Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2008 11:44 pm
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Alles Naar De Klote/Wasted (1996)
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Wasted! (Naar de Klote!) A film by Ian Kerkhof
Filed under: 1996 - wasted! (naar de klote!) — ABRAXAS @ 12:43 pm
thom hoffmann in naar de klote! (wasted!)
Currently showing in City, Amsterdam; Catharijne, Utrecht; De Melkweg, Amsterdam; Filmhuis de Provadja, Alkmaar.
‘Dealing’s what’s happening, you know, it’s the nineties’ says the feared dealer of pills, JP, in Ian Kerkhof’s latest film, as he entices young Jackie into selling XTC for him. Wasted! is about the exciting house scene of the nineties, although the film unfortunately gives a somewhat superficial interpretation of what has been termed the first real youth culture. This can be seen in the cliched casting. The main roles go to beautiful young Jackie and her boyfriend Martijn who sink deeper and deeper into trouble as the film progresses. Rough underworld figures provide the necessary element of violence. And then of course there are the kids, eager to pop and sniff themselves into a trance, which they do at huge house-parties.
One of the reasons that the story in the film never really takes off is that neither of the main characters has any psychological depth. Take for example the relationship between Jackie and her mother: mother visits daughter just when all sorts of outlandish characters who have bought pills from Jackie are filling the flat; mother proceeds to warn daughter that she shouldn’t mix with such riffraff, whereupon she is promptly shown the door by her daughter. But at the end of the film when Jackie is really in danger she shuts herself up in the toilet with her mobile and calls her mother to tell her she loves her. You learn little more about the conflict between mother and daughter than the bland cliche story of an adolescent girl who turns to drugs because of problems at home.
In Wasted! it almost seems as if Kerkhof has actually set out to depict moralistic press stories about wild parties and excesses. As a number of insiders have rightly pointed out, it is questionable whether in reality the Dutch house scene is anything like the image of shaven pill-taking gabbers in shiny tracksuits with throbbing music portrayed in the film. But in spite of this, Kerkhof’s film is fascinating because of the way it deals with images. The film gains an added narrative dimension through a daring use of handycam and computer. The constant nervous camera movement and the VJ-like visual experiments drag the viewer into the psychedelic scenes. Images are manipulated and sampled to the rhythm of the house music created a visual effect which itself is narcotic.
Every time someone in the film gulps another mouthful of pills and ‘gets wasted’, Kerkhof manages to induce such a strong physical effect that the viewers end up feeling almost nauseous themselves. In the first intense bout of sex between JP and Jackie for instance, the realistic image gradually fades to the background, and colours dissolve into a light-blue haze, a transcendental blue as fluid as water-colour. JP and Jackie have taken enough pills to reach an ecstatic condition which is conjured up by a virtuoso performance of focus, movement and colour. In fact, nearly all the colours in Wasted! appear strikingly mannered and unnatural: flashing pink, supergreen or lightning purple. The room shared by the wild girl-friends Yoyo and DD is painted in green, yellow and orange house colours resembling a huge psychedelic sea. It is striking that the artificial colours form a visual narrative which portray the surrealistic world of house much more convincingly than the story-line of the film itself.
The rhythms and musical effects of DJs and VJs are interwoven with the technical possibilities of film in such a way that Huib Stam was led to write in de Volkskrant that the film is ‘not about house, but is house’. The mixing of images and colours reaches its visual climax when the famous DJ Cowboy invites his girlfriend DD to take over as DJ for a moment at a house-party. A few scenes earlier DD has picked up Cowboy in a record shop to further her career. Soon she and Yoyo - who turns out to be a singer - have captured the public with their frenzied and erotic house music. Cowboy’s invitation to play that one number is the beginning of their success. You see the hypnotized, wild crowd, dancing to the rhythm of alternately slowed-down and speeded-up music, change into pure movement and colour. Sometimes a record-player flashes by, with colours rotating at lightning speed; at other times a jubilant face is lit up at an ecstatic moment to produce an expressionist film variant of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
This fascinating dynamic colour aesthetic can also be seen in details. Jackie’s old-fashioned toilet bowl, painted in bright colours and stripes is transformed into a fantastic churning composition as Jackie desperately flushes away JP’s pills. The spinning colourful toilet-bowl becomes a metaphor for all the emotions which just previously have overwhelmed her. In fact, Martijn has just slammed the door behind him after a violent quarrel resulting from his discovery that Jackie has been having sex with JP.
Such metaphorical cinematic images are used frequently in the film. Music, money, violence and pills, that’s what’s important in the house- culture, and it is hardly coincidental that it is precisely these elements which are repeatedly magnified in colourful, almost abstract, images. Take money for example. Whenever Jackie sells some pills at the beginning of the film, the bright green thousand-guilder notes swing for a couple of seconds dramatically over the counter. And at the end, when Jackie, having repeatedly being threatened, tries to return the money she owes to the powerful dealer Winston and finds him dead, she lays the four thousand-guilder notes excruciatingly slowly, one by one, in front of his dead body. The slowly fading green notes remain visible as a prolonged dramatic symbol.
At the climax of the film everyone seems to be literally ‘getting wasted’. Martijn has been beaten up in a snack bar by his arch-enemy JP and his crew. Jackie has been betrayed by her friends, landing her in a very dangerous situation. Winston has been shot by JP after the fatal words ‘Hey, this isn’t a Tarantino movie’ whereupon the violence explodes.
Martijn eventually turns out to be the unexpected hero: he has found a few friends to help him smash up JP’s car in front of the building where the house-party is taking place. The film then seems to shatter into a hundred thousand coloured fragments and the whole cinema screen explodes into smithereens. This is also the visual climax of the film, in which the cinematic effects remind one of the exploding paint spots in a Gerhard Richter painting. Repetitions, delays and accelerations mean that you can ‘enjoy’ this aestheticising of violence for a long time.
Now the film has as it were been ‘wasted’, the Tarantino movie can end, and reality can take over again. In the final scene the film takes an unexpected turn. Bad guy JP is beaten up, DJ Cowboy, overcome by an overdose of drugs and misery, ends up dead by the roadside and Martijn and Jackie, as in a real love-story with a happy ending, fall into each others’ arms. The film ends with them driving towards the horizon, gleefully counting all the villains’ money, which they magically produce from their pockets.
Sjoukje van der Meulen,
Metropolis M
1997, number 1
Dutch:
Code:
Nederland
Drama
100 minuten
geregisseerd door Ian Kerkhof
met Thom Hoffman, Fem van der Elzen en Tygo Gernandt
Provinciaals meisje Jacky trekt naar de grote stad. De verleidingen van het nachtelijke stadsleven worden groter als ze een louche zakenman ontmoet die haar overhaalt om pillen te dealen. Aan twee vriendinnen leent ze teveel geld en ze dreigt onder te gaan in de even hippe als criminele wereld rond de housescene. Naar de klote! is opgenomen met de modernste videotechnieken en daarna overgezet op film.
(с)http://gabber.od.ua/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2866
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