Claude lives with a pregnant mother (Plummer, one of only a handful of pros in a convincing cast) and an abusive father who pumps iron, but who harbours secret erotic feelings for his son. Tate lives with his grandparents and a three-legged dog called Legs like most healthy teenage boys, he likes to strangle himself, then masturbate while watching grunting female tennis players on TV. He's one of five teenage denizens of the middle-class suburban hell of Visalia, California, whose lives provide the film's narrative backbone. Ken Park is not a place: it's the name of the freckly skateboarder who blows his brains out to jump-start the film. And the mating ceremony of the three high school friends (two boys, one girl) is captured with exemplary clarity and resolution, as if this were a National Geographic documentary. The male organ, that shy beast of the cinematic jungle, is coaxed into a clearing and persuaded to jump up and down and get excited, and over-excited, all in full graphic detail. This is kids Two, in fact, without the hard drugs but with parents, grandparents, sex, and more sex.

It explains why Ken Park has a lot more in common with kids than with Clark's two intervening films. Although that film suddenly made Clark bankable, few US producers wanted to touch a picture that was always going to be unrated, and the project lay fallow until Dutch producer Kees Kasander (the Greenaway man) came on board with French colleague Jean-Louis Piel to greenlight what is, in production terms, an almost entirely European movie. Korine wrote the script for Ken Park in 1995, before kids had even gone into production. As with Clark's 1995 debut, kids, buzz will generate demand, and demand will force the market to find ways of getting this seen, censors or no censors. Though it is likely to run into severe certificate problems in many territories, including, of course, the US, this will not prevent more adventurous distributors from taking it on. Ken Park, the second script Harmony Korine wrote for Clark before they stopped speaking to each other, is a thought-provoking study of mixed-up youth and mixed-up parents in turn-of-the-millennium America, which moves between deadpan farce, emotional and physical violence and moments of surprising tenderness. It would be a shame, though, to get stuck on a fuck or two. 92mins.Įvery film festival needs its succes de scandale, and who better than Larry Clark to lay on the controversy at Venice 2002' Ken Park - co-directed by Clark and cinematographer Ed Lachman - contains scenes of graphic, uncut sexual activity between what look like consenting minors, not to mention sex between minors and majors.

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