Ghost World (111 mins, 15) Directed by Terry Zwigoff; starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Bob Balaban, Illeana Douglas
Disco Pigs (94 mins, 15) Directed by Kirsten Sheridan; starring Elaine Cassidy, Cillian Murphy
Mr Brother Tom (111 mins, 18) Directed by Dom Rotheroe; starring Jenna Harrison, Ben Whishaw
For 70 years there has been a mutually profitable interplay between cinema and the comic strip. The American cartoon book artists of the 1930s who drew The Spirit, The Shadow and Batman were influenced by the German expressionist films of Fritz Lang, and when Lang emigrated to the States he studied the American comic strips. Recently, so-called graphic novels have begun bringing to the English-speaking world the respect that les bandes dessinées have long enjoyed in France, and one of the movies many of us most look forward to next year is the Hughes Brothers' version of From Hell, Alan Moore's remarkable graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, starring Johnny Depp as a Scotland Yard inspector. Meanwhile, we have the impressive Daniel Clowes's Ghost World, the feature debut of the documentarist Terry Zwigoff who directed Crumb , an astonishing film about the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and his family.
Shot in the manner of a comic strip with careful compositions and barely perceptible camera movements, the film centres on two high-school chums in California - Enid (Thora Birch), a bespectacled, raven-haired Jewish girl, and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), a conventionally good-looking blonde Gentile. Both actresses are excellent. Despising their eager conformist contemporaries and the bland culture of their anonymous suburban world, they've decided to forgo university and to sneer in superior fashion at the world from a shared apartment. They'll pay their way with jobs that demand little personal commitment. What sets them apart from similar screen malcontents is the wit and trenchancy of their observations, and the objectivity with which they're presented. Their alienation does not bring them happiness and one suspects that Rebecca, who lives with her grandmother, is merely going through a phase before settling down. Enid, on the other hand, who has a doting widowed father, is a genuine rebel.
At the centre of the film is a character who isn't in the book, Seymour, a memorable addition to Steve Buscemi's gallery of uningratiating loners. The fastidious, ill-at-ease Seymour is a middle-aged, middle-management employee of a fast-food franchise who lives in a past he never knew, surrounded by prewar furniture and ornaments and listening to a large collection of 78rpm gramophone records, many of them rare blues items. The title of the film and the book comes from a curious graffito Clowes saw scrawled on a Chicago garage. To him 'ghost world' suggests the anomie, accidie and emptiness of our rootless, corporate-managed culture that the girls mock and against which Seymour has created a personal haven.
Initially, Seymour becomes the object of one of Enid and Rebecca's manipulative games when they answer his lonely hearts ad in search of a long-lost girlfriend. But they get involved in his life, he becomes a real person to them, and the joke turns very sour. Meanwhile, Enid has to attend a summer-school art class to make up a grade for her high-school diploma and she both loathes and seeks the approbation of her teacher (Illeana Douglas), whose pretensions and political correctness epitomise all that the girls have rejected.
Ghost World is a cool, touching, very funny movie. It's almost wholly lacking in sentimentality, though some might find sentimental a recurrent figure whom I found rather moving - an old man waiting on a bench at a bus stop for a service that has been discontinued. This strand, however, becomes part of the film's ironic pay-off when one day a bus does arrive and the man goes on a journey.
The week's other two films are both directorial debuts - Kirsten Sheridan's Disco Pigs from Ireland, Dom Rotheroe's My Brother Tom from England, both films of some promise but little achievement. Almost identical in storyline as well as in social and psychological thrust, they merge in the viewer's mind. Both are about unhappy teenage schoolkids, sexually confused, repelled by an indifferent, abusive adult world, uneasy with their peers and entering into dangerously intense relationships that become almost incestuous when they declare themselves to be twin brother and sister. In both cases, the girl is merely somewhat disturbed and the boy verging on the psychotic. They talk to each other in private baby talk using icky pet names: the boys' possessiveness leads to acts of extreme violence against suspected rivals; and both affairs ends with the violent death of one partner.
I found equally unconvincing the cavortings around Cork and at a school for delinquent girls in Donegal in Disco Pigs and the Adam-and-Eve games played in a Hertfordshire wood in My Brother Tom . I also have it on reliable authority that everything connected with religion at the Catholic school attended by the English kids is dead wrong, which wouldn't have happened in the Irish picture had it been set at a parochial school. If Disco Pigs has a slight edge over My Brother Tom it's because it looks better. Though shot by the distinguished Dutch cameraman Robby Müller, the digital video gives My Brother Tom that home-movie look and spurious sense of reality we associate with the Danish Dogmatists with whom Müller has worked.
