Now just a couple years away from 80, Tulsa’s own scumbag auteur Larry Clark is still making movies about teens having sex and doing drugs, with concerning zeal. His recent years have been taken up by the ambitious Marfa Girl trilogy, a pretty nasty, maybe magnum opus, that’s up to all of Clark’s usual tricks, but set in Marfa, Texas at the intersection of the U.S. art world and immigration crisis. Marfa Girl 2 dropped back in 2018, though presumably not to enough excitement that Clark could get the third film greenlit (it is no longer listed on IMDb), and so it would seem that the director has moved on for the time being, his latest film a short that takes him back to Paris for the first time since 2014’s The Smell of Us. Co-directed alongside Jonathan Velasquez, the star of his 2005 film Wassup Rockers, A Day in a Life holds no surprises for those familiar with Clark’s filmography, essentially a series of very quick sketches (total runtime only amounting to 15 minutes) running through the expected iconography and scenarios (skating, snorting, smoking, fucking). A Day in a Life is wispy fare, with a standoff between a girl and her step-dad (a surprise appearance from currently ubiquitous Vincent Macaigne, giving off very unsavory vibes) trying to keep her from going out to party accounting for the bulk of the short’s dramatic action. Otherwise, Clark is as stylish as ever, flashing aesthetic title cards and indulging romanticized, neon-drenched handheld cinematography, but his proclivities and gaze are likewise unchanged, still morally fraught and fetishistic.
Published as part of FIDMarseilles 2021 — Dispatch 1.
