IF THIS film didn’t come with the word “documentary” stamped on its base, then you could be forgiven for thinking it the most appallingly cliched picture of the season.
Nanette Burstein’s strange entertainment follows five students through their final year at high school in the American Midwest. They are, from what we can judge, all living, breathing teenagers, but even John Hughes would have thought twice about drawing on such familiar stock characters.
Colin is a jock. Mitch is the dreamboat. Hannah is the woollen- hat wearing emo kid. Megan is the well-off, bitchy mean girl. Jake is the video-game-obsessed nerd. Indeed, the producers were so aware of their film's proximity to Hughesland that they modelled their poster on that of The Breakfast Club.
Weirdly, Laurent Cantet's recent The Class, an improvised drama, feels closer to reality than does American Teen. This is as much to do with the way the films are shot and edited than with the nature of their characters. Whereas The Classforced us to raw conclusions about the student's home lives from hints and evasions in their dialogue, American Teenallows no secrets and no gaps in the narrative.
We see one of the girls lying on a couch. (Was the director really filming every second?). Her phone bleeps and we are presented with a cutaway of a text message from her boyfriend. She’s dumped.
Such sequences make it all too clear that Burstein, who previously directed The Kid Stays in the Picture, is making no serious attempt to pretend that she hasn't indulged in a degree of restaging. Nobody is going to confuse American Teenwith Michael Apted's Seven Up!
Still, despite the fact that the film does play like compromised reality television, there’s no denying that it does tell four good stories, and that one does find oneself caring about the participants. I guess cliches get that way for a reason.
