Ken Park

Since the 1970s, when as a photographer he caused a storm with an all-revealing photo book about American kids, controversy and Larry Clark have gone hand in hand. That has not changed since he made his film début with Kids, based on a script by Harmony Korine. Those two, along with co-director and unsurpassed cameraman Ed Lachman (Far from Heaven) are responsible for Ken Park, a film that can easily be described as the most explicit portrayal of the drama that growing up in American suburbia can be.Ken Park is the story of four families in Visalia, California, a suburb that lies like an isolated island somewhere between Los Angeles and Fresno. The moral and physical relationships between parents and children are enlarged in a taboo-breaking way. Shawn, Peaches, Claude and Tate, the girl and three boys we follow for several days, all have their problems with their tutors, varying from bible-reading psychotics to Scrabbling pensioners. The different scenes are powerful dramas in which a gruesome reality is even more exaggerated. The sketch of the fury, the emotional confusion, the depression and moral bankruptcy is explosive, but not without compassion: Ken Park ends with an almost idyllic filmed trio on a sleepy Saturday afternoon. A cameo of a world without troubled adults.