Totally F***ed Up

Turning aside from the in-your-face sloganeering of The Living End, Gregg Araki returns here to the slangy, intimate, domestic domain of his earlier work. Crashing ennui and tortured love-lives are again the keynote, as an assortment of young gay Angelinos laze around each other's apartments, get bored with cruising the local scene, mess up their relationships and major in teenage angst. Between times, Araki - who directed, co-produced, wrote, photographed and edited the picture - weighs in with an intermittent flutter of suicide statistics, found footage and pointed intertitles. It's all very self-consciously cool, of course, but from this side of the Atlantic, you can forgive the film's endless posturing and tune in to its honest, sympathetic portrayal of late adolescence. Araki covers any number of bases, revolving around two-timing would-be movie-maker Steven (Luna) and melancholy existential hipster Andy (Duval, a real find). Indeed, for all its rather obvious attitude, the film's conventional at heart: a soap for the slack generation, that'll strike a chord way outside the confines of the New Queer Cinema.