Paranoid Park

Paranoid Park feels like a provocative continuation of Gus Van Sant's recent, extraordinary trilogy of films: Gerry, Elephant and Last Days. This new work shares with them a fragmentary, ethereal quality: they are modest enterprises, trading on quiet nuance and atmosphere; they resist direct analysis but form coherent narrative units. As we begin considering them as a whole, the films show more and more moments of intersection, languidly yielding hard-won truths about the nature of hope and fear, especially as they relate to the inner lives of young men in the modern world. It appears that Van Sant is creating a sprawling, ambitious work about the human condition, one stealthy chapter at a time. On paper, Paranoid Park is robustly narrative. A teenaged boy and his friend check out a mythologized skate park. The youth's attraction to its culture of punkish freedom and the hypnotic rhythms of ball bearings on concrete lead him into a fast friendship with a low-life anarchist. Something horrific happens at the nearby railyards, and suddenly our young man is at the centre of a criminal investigation. But what crime did he commit, if any? – TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL