FUN
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1997 Shane R. Burridge
Fun (1994) 105m.
Few would have expected Rafal Zielinski, a director of simple teenage sex comedies, to come up with this riveting study of two girls detained in a juvenile correction facility. Bonnie (Alicia Witt) and Hillary (Renee Humphrey) meet on the side of the road one morning. By the day's end they have committed themselves to a lifelong friendship sealed in a pact of blood. William R. Moses and Leslie Hope play the two adults trying to get to grips with the two girls and unearth the full story behind their crime. While both have common goals, their motivations are different - Hope is a prim, businesslike prison counselor determined to drive a wedge between the closed bond the girls have formed; Moses is a magazine journalist who at first appears out of his depth but gradually gains some insight into Hillary, the more approachable of the duo. His reasons for `getting the story' have a resonance that is relevant to our experience of the film itself: he feels it is Hillary's duty to explain every detail of her senseless, violent crime so that she may share with his readers her experience and help them understand what makes a young teenager go so wildly off the rails. Of course, we are undergoing an identically vicarious situation by not only peering in on the interrogation of the two girls but also reliving their crime through flashbacks. Whether or not, however, we gain a greater understanding of the girls is murky. Throughout, they insist on only one motivation for their acts: fun.
I'm not sure why Zielinski chose to film the present-day sequences in black and white and the flashbacks in color (other than to subvert the convention of doing it the other way around) but they provide an appropriate contrast of worlds - the word of adult reason, where there is a clear definition of right and wrong/black and white; and the girls' own world, an ephemeral, careless playground of `fun'. As the two teenagers, Witt and Humphrey are dazzling. Witt is so natural it's hard to believe her lines were scripted - what an ear for dialogue writer James Bosley has! Her delirious performance is what you'll remember most from this film. FUN is not for all tastes: these girls are frank, vulgar, and frighteningly irresponsible - some viewers may be disturbed that teenagers will identify with the characters' high-octane teen angst and take their own best-friend coteries to an illogical extreme. This seems more specifically pertinent when you remember that Bonnie and Hillary, who are greatly influenced by movies and television themselves, appear uninterested in forming any dissociation between their realities and fictions. Hillary frames her prison interviews the way they would exist in a TV-movie; Bonnie, a habitual liar, persists in reciting a scenario in which she is one of an army of invisible ninja. The irony is that this effect makes the movie appear even more real. In fact, what's most spooky about it is that its resemblance to based-on-fact dramatizations is so strong there's virtually no distinction between them.
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