By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Larry Clark
Country: united_states
Year: 2015
Running time: 105
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2168854
Kyle says: “Maverick writer/director Larry Clark received an award from the Rome Film Festival in 2012 for MARFA GIRL, which has since made sporadic appearances at various international film festivals, before finally making its DVD and Netflix debuts in the summer of 2015. Many of the negative comments made about Clark’s work over the years have become positive qualities in hindsight: his camera emphasis on adolescent sex and drug use, including teenage nudity and simulated sexual intercourse, dysfunctional family relationships, widespread failure of and interest in education, and the potential for violence lurking around every corner and in every relationship. The one that really gets the Clark haters going, of course, is their conviction he has crossed the boundary into child pornography — his teenage boys and girls lolling about naked, the camera lovingly embracing the glistening skin, pubic hair, and sex organs.
“The Clark teenagers from KIDS (1995) through MARFA GIRL are neither solid citizens nor the dregs of society; they are defiantly ordinary finding little of interest in their surroundings, including family and school, and seeking stimulation through sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Their ordinariness includes their physical attributes: These are not young people groomed for the lights, cameras and action of pornography. Clark’s seemingly invasive closeups and post-coital intrusions emphasize these adolescents’ flawed complexions and physiques. In fact, Clark’s least interesting film is BULLY, in which the movie star gloss of Brad Renfro, Bijou Phillips, Rachel Miner, Nick Stahl, and Michael Pitt worked against the film’s toxic variation on Lord of the Flies.
“In one of numerous classic Clark sequences in MARFA GIRL, the title character (Drake Burnette) barges into the bathroom in which Adam (Adam Mediano), who has celebrated his 16th birthday by getting laid, is taking a bath. She pulls up her dress, pees and commences a conversation with him about having been encouraged by her ‘free love’ father to have lots of sex, so she is regarded as a slut and consequently hangs out mostly with guys. When Adam agrees that a girl who has sex a lot is a slut, she responds, ‘Why can’t I be the player? What’s wrong with that? I’m not ready to settle down. Why should I have sex with just one guy?’ She tenderly washes him as she describes a threesome she had with her Mexican boyfriend and his younger brother. Finishing her story, she throws a towel at Adam and comments, ‘Looks like you popped a boner!’ Their continuing raunchy conversation about oral sex is very funny.
“Much of MARFA GIRL could be considered positively bucolic were it not for local cops cruising town in a white car labeled ‘U.S. Customs and Border Protection’ whose civic duty is little else aside from harassing and arresting Latinos, in fact almost anybody, without cause. They confront Marfa Girl for inspecting an empty building as a potential arts facility and dropping the name of a local foundation at which she is doing an arts residency. She is accused of being ‘some white privileged girl from the suburbs who’s had everything handed to her’ by one of the officers, and their conversation becomes a debate on legalities of immigration and citizenship.
“Local lunatic cop Tom (Jeremy St. James), whose idea of a date is bringing a young woman to his scary bedroom for sex, who prints out and carries around a sheaf of computer photos of vaginal infections from STDs, is accused by Adam’s mother Mary (Mary Farley) of being too hard on her teenage son, to which Tom responds, ‘He shouldn’t have run from me: He could have been an illegal, or Al Qaeda’. We have moved precipitously from a work of Larry Clark’s imagination more than three years ago to the political idiocy — and reality — of the moron wearing a Donald Trump t-shirt at a Trump campaign event in Rochester, New Hampshire, Thursday September 17, who said: ‘We have a problem in this country: It’s called Muslim….. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?’ One smiles to reflect upon what Mark Twain would say about this embarrassing moment in American history. 4 cats
“Saturday, September 19, 2015, on Netflix, New York”