CLERKS
A film review by Sue Roberts
Copyright 1996 Sue Roberts
Directed by Kevin Smith. Starring Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Mary Ghigliotti.
Wicked, amusing and possibly the most outrageous thing you will hear in a long time.
It opens a door on the life of Dante and shows a hell of a day. The boss has gone to Connecticut and the poor guy finds it anything but convenient that he's been left him to mind the shop.
The customers are a truly bizarre assortment of folk. However its not hard for him to appear competent compared to Randal from the store next door!
A hockey game was planned, but things don't turn out the way he intended.The funeral was unexpected, and when a lady from the past turns up, it causes him to ask where his life is headed!.
Like all good comedy it leans on the boundaries of taste, but has a ring of truth underlying some of the jokes. The conversation stretches over life, the universe and everything. Is it any wonder with this assortment of characters dropping in?
Orson Welles made "F for Fake" about how the camera can be used to confuse the viewer's perception of what is fact, or fabrication, in art and in life. But Smith goes further down the road towards Ken Loach's "Raining Stones" in his choice of social realism for a backdrop. The grain of the black and white filmstock gives this film the ambience of a documentary and I think it is the presentation of fiction in this format which makes "Clerks" astonishingly powerful.
He puts his finger neatly on the sense of women that education is something to be fought for, but asks some impertinent questions about whether they are using their freedom without responsibility. Maybe the hockey players are not alone in taking their eye off the ball.
Perhaps most astonishing is the representation of young men with little conception of how, or where, they might engage with society.
Such a satire, that dénouement. The mere suggestion that a dealer could have more commitment to his work than a bona fide employee, and more awareness of what is relevant in life, points to some glaring holes in what this world seems to offer the next generation.
Funny and darned clever.
Sue Roberts SRoberts@griffin.compulink.co.uk
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