Kaboom

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2010

Kaboom
Gregg Araki
USA/FRANCE, 2010
English 86 minutes Colour/D-Cinema
Production Company: Why Not Productions
Executive Producer: Sebastién K. Lemercier, Pascal Caucheteux, Jonathan Schwartz
Producer: Andrea Sparling, Gregg Araki
Screenplay: Gregg Araki
Cinematographer: Sandra Valde-Hansen
Editor: Gregg Araki
Production Designer: Todd Fjelsted
Sound: Trip Brock
Music: Ulrich Schnauss, Mark Peters, Vivek Maddala
Principal Cast: Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett
Production: Why Not Productions

Never underestimate the influence of John Waters. Apparently, he mentioned to Gregg Araki that, while he admired Araki’s recent, more serious films like Mysterious Skin, he really missed the questionable taste and confrontational panache of films like The Doom Generation and Totally F***ed Up. From that conversation Kaboom was born, and it does indeed share key touchstones with Araki’s earlier films, including scatological and absurd Valley-inflected dialogue, elements of campy gore and Araki’s troupe of arrestingly sexy guys and girls. But Kaboom also feels like a stealthily sophisticated synthesis of Araki’s various experiments in tone and cinematography, a product of someone hitting their prime as a radical, independent artist.

Any attempt to walk through a conventional plot synopsis for Kaboom feels like a feeble exercise. One could say that it concerns a sex-crazed bisexual college boy plunging headlong into a supernatural world of demons, cults, human sacrifice and potential Armageddon. But the film ultimately ends up being about, and existing in, a borderline psychotic, psychosexually- hyperactive imaginary universe that feels absolutely real and true—not so much prescient as an alternate version of reality. The film’s often chilling, drug-saturated paranoia (even we audience members start looking over our shoulders) makes the film feel like a mélange of The Manchurian Candidate and Liquid Sky.

What matters about Kaboom, other than its exceptional directorial control of outrageously over-the-top material, is that Araki is able to reveal beautiful moments of human emotion against the backdrop of a manic tableau. Great sadness and joy inflect even the silliest of scenes; the confusion and pain of the onset of adulthood is felt deeply throughout, and Araki evokes just the right amount of wistfulness for a more carefree time.

It’s also really freakin’ funny. Corrosively so. And sexy, in an about-to-get-busted kind of way. In fact, Kaboom just might be the first great paranoid, dystopian sex comedy in the history of cinema. Bravo!
—Noah Cowan