wasted!
jimmy gulzar and fem van den elzen in wasted!
The agony and the ecstasy
Review: Wasted
By Lauren Shantall
An image of a dove in flight opens Ian Kerkhof’s Wasted. It’s imprinted on a tab of ecstasy, setting the premise for the film in the first few seconds. Wasted is an hallucinatory trip through chemically enhanced lands of excess, yet it is not an uncomplicated, euphoric ride. Despite spinning a love story, Kerkhof’s over-arching cynicism is never far from the fore, and the film, ultimately, is a downer.
When this exploration of rave culture was first released in Holland in 1995, it was an instant box-office success and was critically acclaimed at the Rotterdam and Berlin film festivals. It played at the Labia in Cape Town (who bought the rights when Ster-Kinekor passed the film over) on the Marginal South African Cinema festival in 1996, at the Durban Film Festival and at the 1997 Grahamstown film festival. Now Wasted takes up position on South Africa’s First Dutch Film Festival.
Considering the opportunity for cultural exchange that the festival presents, Kerkhof is a welcome choice. A South African who went into exile in the Eighties, and currently lives in Amsterdam, Kerkhof is “South Africa’s most radical and prolific film-maker”, according to fellow film-maker and critic Andrew Worsdale.
He is probably best known here for 10 Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers which screened at the 1994 South African International Film Festival and won Best Film at the Potsdam Film Festival. Kerkhof has long been respected, both in South Africa and in Europe, as an experimental, courageous film-maker. His avant-garde Kyodai Makes the Big Time and The Mozart Bird were well received by art circuit critics overseas.
Naar de klote!, as Wasted is known in Holland, is the director’s first attempt at a feature-length mainstream movie; not aimed, as Kerkhof explained at the film’s release, specifically at “housers”, but at a wider audience. Its subsequent commercial success has firmly cemented Kerkhof as part of a new, young and energetic crop of Netherlands directors, many of whom are showcased on the First Dutch Film Festival.
Hype aside, the film is worth a watch for its adventurous camerawork and special effects - coming as near to a visual representation of a psychoactively altered state as I have ever seen. It even rivals David Cronenberg’s “Interzone” in his version of William Burrough’s tripster classic Naked Lunch.
Rather than going in for Cronenberg’s surreal settings and creature animations that were more suited to Burrough’s toxins, Kerkhof’s characters are Nineties users - they’re “pill”-poppers (as the film’s lingo refers to MDMA). So Wasted employs lots of slow-motion takes and acid-like colour-manipulated frames to try and recreate E’s loved-up slant. Although the visuals are more psychedelic than emotive, they work nonetheless.
Wasted was shot on hand-held home video, and only then transferred to 35mm, so that each video frame could be coloured millimeter by millimeter. Joost van Gelder, whom Kerkhof regards as the “best cameraman in the Netherlands”, is responsible for the unconventional, swooping angles and interesting, disorienting view points.
Most of the shots, except for the slowed-up scenes, are first takes. Combined with the hand-held feel, it gives the film an appealing and intentional rough-and-readiness. It serves to enhance the veracity of the events, lending them a semi-documentary feel.
The camera follows Martijn (Tygo Gernandt) and Jacqueline (a debut performance by Fem van der Elzen), a young, small-town couple, to the big city where they become involved with the underground house party circuit. Jacqui peddles pills to pay bills, gets caught up with a nasty dealer called JP (played by Hugo Metsers III), and becomes further and further embroiled in the world of drugs, sex, debt, violence and house music, while her relationship with Martijn falters.
The plot is somewhat thin - girl-loves-boy, girl-wins-boy - while the sub-plot manages to comment on the cult of the house DJ and the worship he/she commands. Kerkhof tends to hone in on the consequences of dealing ecstasy in his depiction of the club scene - all the characters get their come-uppance in one way or another - exposing the fact that violence and greed often motivate a culture too often held up as innocent in its euphoria. But the wonderful, unusual form, rather than any kind of lesson, is what makes this experiment worth the trip.
this article originally appeared in za@play
March 31st, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Have always wnted to see this film…how does that happen??
July 20th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
I have not seen the movie, so what I state may be off the mark. But I cannot but think about that misunderstood novel by Nobokov, and the movie based on it: Lolita. The story was about a slow but an inevitable degeneration and decay of manhood. As an old saying goes “a fish rots from its head,” human decay begins from the educated cerebral class.
The modern mass media have the propensity to cast human existence as a drama, something which takes place on stage. But the harshness and pain of existence is not a drama. Death is not a pretention on a stage. Misery does not sing an operatic aria; it cries and screams.
It is about the time that movie divorces itself from theater.