The love every parent fears: YOUTH IN REVOLT (2010)

Being blown away by SCOTT PILGRIM I had to check out YOUTH IN REVOLT which promised to fully answer the question: can Michael Cera play anything other than his squirmy ectomorphic sexually-frustrated pansexual 'self'? PILGRIM seemed to indicate yes, but REVOLT answers uh... uh uh..

Cera's essentially playing a dual character: his Nick Twisp (the usual Cera) and his alterego--Francois Dillinger--who is clearly borne of obsessive desire for a sweet neighbor girl whose yen for yeh-yeh, Gainsbourg, and sexual boldness blows the normal Twisp clear into oblivion. Wearing a pencil-thin mustache with white slacks and an ever-present cigarette, Francois is Cera's chance to cowboy up, bust out, get loud, and wear a thin mustache and smoke a cigarette. But he takes only one or two of these chances. Still talking barely above a whisper, Francois never really materializes as a separate 'ballsy' character, just basically a pyromaniac with some foul-mouthed extra confidence, and proves, PILGRIM aside, Cera is still the Stuart Erwin of his generation, the Eddie Bracken with less small-town corn and more art film savvy.

Why Cera? The Cera-phenom didn't start with JUNO or SUPERBAD, it began with ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, but in that series he was a confused hormonal kid trying get out from under the avalanche of contradictory compulsive insecurity of his father. JUNO and SUPERBAD made it a-okay for Cera's brand of high-voiced stream of consciousness too be enter the realm of the horny nerd, and emboldened the horny nerd in the process to have interests beyond peering at dirty magazines, expressing its budding vulgarity and pulling pranks. Now in between all that they can discuss Welles, Bresson, Fellini, Argento, Wood -- they even know that Ozu directed TOKYO STORY, not Mizoguchi.

While REVOLT's pranks are less dorky and more property-damaging than the typical virginity-losing teen sex comedy, touching that vein of troubled boarding school loss as it does, the film's source template emerges (as TAXI DRIVER was the template for Jody Hill's underappreciated OBSERVE AND REPORT) as nothing other than Bertolucci's ENDLESS LOVE (1981), a drama of tortured love and torched property, about a lovestruck arsonist-pursuing his rich girl objet petit a, who was the world's naughty obsession of the moment, Brooke Shields.

In the late 1970s, Shields single-handedly launched the popularity of skin-tight 'designer' jeans with a campaign for Calvin Klein ("Nothing comes between me and my Calivns").  And she was 14; hard to believe in this day and age when Hannah Montana can be blasted to hell for showing her shoulder on a magazine cover. Shields won lots of publicity and moral outrage playing a child prostitute in PRETTY BABY (1978, age 13) and going topless in THE BLUE LAGOON (at age 15 - she had to testify a body double was used due to child pornography accusations); then at 16 playing a sexually budding debutante in Franco Zeffirelli's worst film and biggest box office success, ENDLESS LOVE.
 

I never really understood Shields' flash of appeal, being just 14 myself and more into older women like Cheryl Tiegs, Jaclyn Smith, and Bo Derek, but I remember the film well from the movie posters and commercials and playground word of mouth, and so-- apparently--does REVOLT's director Miguel Arteta (THE GOOD GIRL; CHUCK AND BUCK) who was 16 when ENDLESS LOVE came out and thus wouldn't have been allowed to see it without legal guardian. Straddling the difference between BREATHLESS's insouciance, the indie quirk-studded suburban character ensemble comedy, and ENDLESS LOVE's Franco Zeffirelli mania (there's some good scenes with Justin Long as a Zen-shroomer older brother), YOUTH IN REVOLT ends up being dragged in its saddle.

No offense to true romance, but as I've said before, John Cusak standing outside your window in the dead of night blasting Peter Gabriel from a boombox over his head is called stalking. Every time a girl says that scene (from SAY ANYTHING) is romantic, another girl pays the price as some obsessive maniac takes her rejection as a challenge to keep pursuing, burning down buildings, lacing drinks, blinding horses, breaking into the girl's dorm, killing rivals, and even taking telescoping lens pictures while listening to "la-la-la-la" - the Ennio Morricone soundtrack to L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo. And their methodology is justified (to themselves) everytime some girl gushes over a guy who refused to go away, and bothering them in the dead of night with "In Your Eyes" - the song every parent fears.

The stalker attitude is a sign of a romantic ideal where a million true loves await your ceaseless internet trawling, and you can't quite pick one, so you go for the one you can't have... better to stalk and lose continually then win once and be expected to stay outside the neighbor's bushes.

REVOLT's reptilian adhesion to formality and mammalian desire for characters and change is akin to yesterday's Roger Corman films, studded with interesting characters but robbed of Corman's streak of true, genuine revolution. Random violence in the service of love is not true love, but obsession. It's like that itch on your back and your lover scratches it and it feels good for less than a fraction of a second before the itch moves on. It was never about the itch, the itch was where your incompleteness meant to hide and keep you shopping, drinking, hungering, writing lots of tortured poetry and sighing over LA BOUT DE SOUFFLE, CRAZY LOVE, TRUE ROMANCE, and the song: "My.... endless... love."

The girl of REVOLT, Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) understands this and 'creates' the drama to test her wannabe Lancelot but she's never deluded into believing the tests are anything more than mere amusement-in-the-moment. The tragedy of the film is that in the end the film itself believes the delusions created by her need for drama--as evinced in the final thought of our unreliable narrator, "After all that, Nick Twisp was enough." One is tempted to shout back at the screen: "No it wasn't!" Cera's character is not even 'present' - how can any girl be expected to love a vertical mass of self-conscious neediness and ectomorphic myopia deluded into thinking it's a 'person'? And the same goes for Francois, who turns out to be little more than a gimmick, though Cera's dirty talk has its moments, such as "I want to wrap your legs around my head and wear you like the crown that you are." Nice work. There is after all a difference between the well-laid bluntness of Serge Gainsbourg and the bitter smuttiness of the perennial virgin.

The oxymoronic impression YOUTH gives off of 'trying' to be effortless manifests right off the bat in the dopey claymation credits sequence, which seems to beg the audience to see this as JUNO II.  But at least Diablo had the courage to get out there and do the things she writes about, to get the grody details right. Aside from adequately capturing some of what a shroom trip is like -- though again, the animation is too sophomoric and obvious when effort could have been put into subtle changes like making the walls breath ala THE BLACK SWAN.  It's why all the best artists--like Portman and Aronofsky--are fearless self-examiners, exorcising their demons in public, screaming and howling and trashing hotel rooms, all to keep the crap of self-delusion and obsessive denial of death from fogging up their windshield and making it impossible to see from any kind of artistic vantage point.  If you look at two other 'portrait of an evil doppelganger as a young terrorist/artist' films--THE BLACK SWAN and FIGHT CLUB, the pedestrian safehood of REVOLT--even with shrooms and arson--becomes clear.

Twisp's epiphany that it was "him" all along misses the whole point: magic bullet clinginess is not true love. Doing crazy things for love is fine if you bear in mind that love earned that way isn't going to last more than a night. Concentrate and you can feel an undying soul connection to anything -- a cat or a teddy bear even-- and then it's *Poof!* c'est finis. The moment ends, your attention focuses back on the TV and the cat skulks off into the other room, or Cera gets out of jail and finds none of the expected sparks and crashing trains when he finally shacks up uncontested with Sheeni. Rather than realize the error of his unrealistic expectations, Twisp will undoubtedly suspect Sheeni's sleeping with someone else and that's why he's not "happily ever after." If there was one lesson he could have gleaned from reading Cahiers du Cinema or listening to Serge, that was it. He gleaned it not! Coupez spot publicitaire!


The guys in the above video exemplify here that you can be scrawny and white and nebbishy and still kick every ass in the room. Francois if you're going to wear mirror shades and a silly mustache, best take a lesson!