Norwegianheretic

I have always been a fan of Gus Van Sant and that is why I bought a DVD of this film because it wasn't available anywhere else. It wasn't on NETFLIX or CRITERION or INTERNET ARCHIVE -- even, amazingly, it was not even for rent on AMAZON.

Having just seen it, I can understand why. Paranoid Park belongs to that very rare sort of film that goes straight through your mind, your thoughts, your analyses of things. Van Sant directed it from some hard to define place, maybe from his soul.

No one could make a trailer for this film that would attract an audience of any kind. The only people who can appreciate it are people that have at least some idea of what unique cinema of the heart and soul is all about.

Van Sant won a well deserved Palme D'or from Cannes for Elephant, the only award in the world that actually means something as the Oscars are either a popularity contest or This Guy has done so much before he deserves an Oscar.

Another thing that was astonishingly perfect about this film is his use of Nino Rota's music from Fellini films. Normally, someone doing this would make me angry but Van Sant knew exactly what he was doing and it works perfectly.

Finally, Van Sant being gay presents his audience with the most unique and remarkable portrayal of heterosexual romance. And, in a way, he is able to portray it better than a heterosexual. I am guessing he can do this because he is able to maintain a truly objective distance. In this case, he is just like Stephen Sondheim who created romances in his Musicals that are better than most romances created by heterosexual writers and composers.

I don't know what won Palme D'orr when PARANOID PARK came out but I feel very strongly that Van Sant deserved a second one for this film.

Just as the genius, Henry James, did when he wrote the book upon which this film is based, we see for the very first time in a movie, the torn and broken world in which a 7 year old lives as her parents break up, from the child's point of view. This fact, that for once, at last, a film is made from a child's perspective of breaking up parents, makes the movie the indelible masterpiece that it truly is. Hundreds of movies have attempted and failed to show the effect of divorce on a child because no one before had the emotional and psychological ability to be able to enter the mind and emotions of a child to portray the complex and intricate and ALWAYS IGNORED BY ADULT FILMMAKERS true feelings and perceptions of a child who goes through this mind altering experience. And even though it is the profound subtlety and perfection of Henry James mind that illuminated this perspective, the screenwriters and directors had the almost non-existent ability to truly see the world through the mind of a child just as the titan of literature, Henry James, was able to achieve.

I just watched this film again after not seeing for over forty years. I knew it was fabulous but seeing it again makes me realize that Fassbinder had a very unique kind of talent that you don't find in any other directors at all - and that means people like Hitchcock, Goddard or even Chaplin. It's as if he represents the rebirth of Germany itself, born as he was right after the war ended. And while the Allied powers rebuilt Germany and not making the mistake they did after World War I which enabled Hitler to obtain supreme, Fassbinder and his movies represent an examination of the broken culture which, when he was making his films, didn't recover the magic of the old Germany. And it's his portrayals of pathetic characters like Fox that provided the rest of the world into the very first social view of the emptiness that Germany existed in and how it created a mournful civilization even as their economy flourished. It is really a great tragedy that Fassbinder's totally unique talent to present a completely different side of human nature in this and all of his films died with him. There are, of course, other great directors but Fassbinder had an ability to bring to the screen, a portrayal of culture unique to his time and one that can never be repeated.