An eight-months pregnant high school history teacher keeps a student after class for being tardy and then sleeping through class. Before she administers punishment, she reaches into her bra, takes milk from her lactating breasts, and uses it as lotion, rubbing it on her stomach and then into her hands.
After she’s done, she takes out a paddle, calls the boy over, has him bend over her lap, and administers sixteen taps – not for his infractions but because it’s his sixteenth birthday. There are about three different sub-genres of porn playing out in that one scene. In other words, it’s a Larry Clark flick.
Marfa Girl, set in the real life small arts colony of Marfa, Texas, is the latest Clark film that straddles the fine line between the exploration of teen life/sexuality and pervy exploitation of the same. It’s a very fine line with Clark (director of Kids, Wassup Rockers), dating back to his controversial 1971 photo book, Tulsa.
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At the center of his latest film is sixteen-year-old Adam (Adam Mediano), the recipient of the birthday paddling. A skinny, good looking biracial Latino kid, he lives alone with his white Anglo mom.
His is largely the generic life of a teen boy in a small town – he fucks his good looking girlfriend Inez (Mercedes Maxwell,) skateboards with friends, and tries to avoid cops, in his case that’s the racist Border Patrol agent (Jeremy St. James) who has a disturbing crush on his mom.
The film’s other major character is an unnamed libidinous female artist (Drake Burnette) who endlessly pontificates on racism, sexism and art, and promises Adam that she’ll fuck him in a year, after he has “mastered the clit.”
The meandering film takes all of the above and paces it out through lots of scenes of smoking pot and screwing. There’s a frankness about nudity that would be refreshing for an American filmmaker if Clark’s general vibe and aesthetic weren’t that of a creepy uncle spying on his nieces and nephews through a keyhole.
There’s a bit of violence at the end that, on one hand, captures something of how random and scary unexpected violence can be, how it shocks the system. On the other hand, it seems shoehorned into making some sort of unexplained point.
The thing is, for all the bad acting (and it’s bad), poor pacing, and an elliptical approach to storytelling that creates the sense that Clark’s basic approach to the story is, “Oh, and then this could happen,” the film is oddly compelling to watch. It’s not good, and people who think it’s crap aren’t completely wrong. But Marfa generates something of a magnetic pull on the strength of making the viewer wonder, “Where the hell is this all going?”
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New YorkTimes, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
