Paranoid Park

Boyfriend skates up to cheerleader, steps off his board. She's happy to see him. Camera holds on cheerleader as the audio cuts out, replaced by an amorous string composition (borrowed from Fellini). We can tell that he dumps her. For the next few breathless moments the young actress gets to be a silent movie starlet, quivering and snarling. We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!

It is the rarest pleasure to be reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky, who believed cinema to be the art of sculpting time; his understanding of the medium was among the most sophisticated of the twentieth century masters. Gus Van Sant sometimes works in the popular mode (Milk) but here we get Van Sant the sculptor, creating new structures. His techniques evoke the Russian while keeping to a more everyday concern: Whereas Tarkovsky tends to drift off into ontology (faith and reality, the end of the world, alien sentience) Van Sant instead anchors to material as tangible and warm as the boys skateboarding outside. His best film.

This article discusses the arresting soundscapes of Paranoid Park.