Gummo

Gummo is set in Xenio, a small and blindly dull town in Ohio that was almost destroyed by a tornado a few years back. The film follows several fringe elements, white trash, among them Solomon, a skinny fourteen-year-old kid with a mother who is as confused as she is violent. Solomon’s best friend, Tummler (19), lives with his alcoholic father who has long lost any authority he may have had and never recovered from the death of Tummler’s mother. The two friends spend their days sniffing glue, killing stray cats for money, getting into mischief and worse. Any moral awareness is alien to them. This strange introverted world is also populated by the two white-haired sisters Dot and Helen and a shabby reporter for the gutter press who makes overtures to them. Then there are a man who makes his retarded daughter play the whore and Bunny Boy, a half-naked skateboarder who wears a hat with huge pink rabbit ears and encounters incomprehension and violence everywhere.Gummo is basically a sequence of brief moments with its own style and narrative laws. The camerawork by Jean Yves Escoffier (e.g. Les amants du Pont Neuf) captures the characters in a bright saturated light and in painterly compositions intercut with Polaroid, video and Super 8 pictures. All in all this is quite an achievement by Korine (23!), who sketches an eccentric and no-holds-barred picture of American youth today in Gummo.