Loren Cass

What begins as an almost sullen and certainly glacial story about wayward teens in St. Petersburg, Florida grows into an eerie meditation—the sort that people, when they’ve had the distance, look back on with a misplaced feeling of warmth. This is profoundly ironic as the kids in this film are angry, restless, seething, silent and self-destructive. (Ahhh—adolescence!) These kids are not the ideal teens of your movie-typical, sweetly slow moving “Small Town,” and the film isn’t your run-of-the-mill pretentious indie excavation of their coming of age. With a following that will grow with its critical endorsements (Nathan Lee for the New York Times thought it was the best thing this generation), Loren Cass is destined for a position in a cannon, even if the box office returns for distributor Kino aren’t quite so noteworthy.

The teens are nameless, more or less. At one point, one introduces herself as Nicole (Kayla Tabish). Otherwise, the main pair of nearly punk, working class boys (Jason and Cale) are like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: trapped in a void, suffering from interchangeable and therefore purposeless identities. As opposed to throwing words around about their conditions, these angry young teens are silent. The boys break their silences occasionally to fight, throw beer bottles, see the occasional metal band, wander. Nicole, the only girl, has endless casual sex she cares nothing about. They all go to high school (sort of) and out of boredom they destroy themselves in increments.

The film takes place in 1997, in the time after a black motorist named Tyrone Lewis was gunned down by a white police officer. Occasionally, audio from various sources hints at this context, but the audio is scratchy and the tension that pervades the film (both racial and otherwise) seems constant and detached from any recent tragedy—all the audio carries with it the gauzy tone of recordings from the 1960’s. Growth feels oxymoronic or improbable.

The single greatest thing about Loren Cass is that it remains mostly silent. The only dialogue hints at things already under the skin and, with only two exceptions, feels like an intrusion in a thoughtfully quiet universe. Even a house party offers us no distinct voices: they’re all just a mass of ambitionless bodies. Comparisons to Kids and Gummo are easy, but this one is foraging such distinct territory it’s hard to justify comparing it to anything. At the same time, it’s clearly influenced by the stronger indie/arthouse pix of the late 1960’s. Killer of Sheep felt quietly present in the details, while, for one moment, the film looked as if it might have been reversing the final scene in The Graduate. (Implying the kids are used to not knowing the future?) The brief and almost believable romance that breaks the stoic dryness of the film is fantastically welcome.

Distributor: Kino
Cast: Kayla Tabish, Tracis Maynard and Chris Fuller
Director/Screenwriter: Chris Fuller
Producer: Kayla Tabish, Chris Fuller and Frank Craft
Genre: Drama
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 83 min.
Release date: July 24 NY, September 11 LA