Elephant
dir. Gus Van Sant
Last year's Palme D'Or winner, Gus Van Sant's Elephant, begins with a blank stare up at the sky. This shot defines the nature of the film: watching, seemingly aimlessly, not an explanation but rather a presentation. Harris Savides' camera floats fluidly through a normal high school on a normal day, presenting us with mere snippets of various teenagers' normal activities. There's not enough for us to get a full sense of their characters, but with each vignette we understand a little bit more about them, enough to introduce the vaguest of attachments to them all. A viewer with no idea of the film's story might be questioning the point of the entire exercise, until a scene a little more than half an hour in, where one of the characters comes across two youths clad in military gear and with packed bags over their shoulders, warning him to stay away. It's then that we fully realise that this ordinary day is about to be interrupted by something unexpected, shocking and horrifying. Van Sant doesn't cut back to this scene until much later in the film, instead returning to following the various teenagers around the school--except now everything is burdened with an almost unbearable tension and sadness, knowing what is about to befall them all. As the different characters (played entirely by untrained amateur actors, their performances adding to the heartbreaking sense of dreamy realism) wander around taking pictures, stacking library shelves, participate in a class discussion or wait to be chided by the principal, Van Sant builds up the sense of proleptic tragedy until the final shocking last half hour, disturbing not because of extreme graphic violence (a tired standby the film thankfully doesn't resort to) but the emptiness surrounding not only the killers but the depiction of the event itself. Van Sant strips the event of any theatricality or melodrama, Savides' camera instead looking starkly on as the inexplicable horror tears through the school and through the lives of everyone involved. This is another magnificent strength of the film: Van Sant does not seek to explain away the actions of the killers as many did after the actual Columbine killings (the event the film is based upon). We see one of them playing a violent video game; they sit and watch an old documentary on Hitler for a few minutes (although one of them seems to barely know who Hitler is); in another scene one of them is bullied by the rest of his class; finally, on the morning before they go to the school, the two share a kiss in the shower. These brief snatches of time cannot be interpreted as legitimately full reasons for their actions: indeed, Van Sant himself says the film's title is taken from the ancient parable of several blind men each examining various parts of an elephant, and each coming away with different ideas on what the creature is based on what they touched, none seeing the whole. This is Van Sant's achievement: he refuses to give us an easy reason for these events--he just watches, mesmerisingly yet non-judgmentally. Elephant is affecting, tense, powerful and sticks uncomfortably in the mind long after exiting the cinema. Truly the finest achievement of 2003.
*****