90’s

A modest entry through the 16mm door and intimate film for Jonah Hill, Mid90’s explores an era and a milieu, that of young skaters already widely portrayed in American independent cinema. The first ambition is that of authenticity: the film tells less a story than it restores the atmosphere of a particular period, that of the junction between childhood and adolescence through Stevie , young boy who will integrate with a group of teens as friendly as borderline. If the initiatory narrative works, it is because it manages to find a point of subtle balance between the necessarily illusory subjectivity of the young protagonist and an overhang that will take care never to make a judgment. While we necessarily focus on this development allowing him an emancipation and an amazed look on a new universe, the story does not hide the possible drifts, the gap between his age and the people he frequents and who will not put the necessary limits. This ambivalence, however, is not the breeding ground of traditional dramatic springs, which could so easily lead to a rollercoaster roller coaster ride. The Mid90’s ridge line is tenuous, modest, like this relationship with the big brother, in which violence and silences, humiliations and embarrassed smiles strongly capture a clumsy complicity, imposed, but from which can spring all the same an irreplaceable feeling.

Jonah Hill has the first wisdom to rely entirely on his young actors, who do an admirable job: in their spontaneity, the access they give to the masks proper to their age as well as their faults, distilled at homeopathic dose and allowing, without any weight, a social portrait of the forgotten of America, as trendy as they are neglected. The aftershocks fuse, the idleness and the amused inanity of the conversations is restored with brio, just as the impulses of revolt and the ordalical conduct aiming at an illusory overtaking of oneself. The main character thus crystallizes all these tendencies, he who wants to go faster than the others, at the risk of a certain danger (that also recalls his nickname, SunBurn), but can not help but be kindness incarnated , (nice reason to learn that this “thank you” he thinks “make gay”) this part of childhood that still remains in him and that will make a girl converse with him: “You’re at that age before guys become dicks “.

The realization only has to accompany the movement of skateboarders, and Jonah Hill is doing very well. Supported by the ideal compilation of the 90’s (Wu-Tang Clan, Pixies, Nirvana, A Tribe Calles Quest and others), the camera is one with its characters, within a narrow frame (the 16mm) which follows the movement always renewed of kids in perpetual motion. Summaries, jump cuts, ellipses synthesize wonderfully a time based on the renewal and the slow maturation, on a duration as modest (1:25) as dense. If one can fear that the automatisms of the writing do not resume their rights in the last quarter of an hour (parental crisis, increase of the behaviors with risk), the narrative takes care not to remain on these peaks, leaving the life daily resume its rights, like the film in abyss that sums up the intention of the young director: to look to the past a sincere look and finally as amazed as that of his character, whose enthusiasm at the flower of skin resurrects lost times.