Gummo 4K 1997

The movie does not have any rigid storyline, distinct main and secondary characters, it does not obey the standard laws of action development of ordinary Hollywood, and in general, movie productions. It is simply a set of episodes and sketches, connected by common characters and location, but without any special “narrative” sequence.

All the actors in the movie are the main ones, but at the same time the attention is never focused on anyone in particular, although the voice-over and most of the time belongs to a fifteen-year-old boy Solomon, who with his slightly older friend Tammer hangs out in the city, kills cats to give their corpses to the local store and sniffs glue.... Throughout the movie we see so many different images and scenes that it would be more than enough for a dozen other movies.

“Gummo” - the directorial debut of 23-year-old Harmony Koraina, the author of the script for another, no less epathetic and provocative film ‘Kids’. And although the style of visual material presentation is very discontinuous - the movie is interspersed with various shooting techniques, documentary and “semi-documentary” episodes, fragments of “home amateur video” and similar visual experiments - it is impossible to tear yourself away from the screen during the whole 88 minutes of the story.

The movie is really addictive thanks to the undoubted talent of the director and screenwriter in one person, who has the gift of “telling stories” even in such an unusual and, as it seems at first glance, uncomfortable form. And, in principle, Gummo is one big, savory and very offensive spit in the face of fed-up “middle-class” America, which does not want to see anything bad that does not fit into its system of values and dignities.

Throughout the movie we don't see a single normal person, although there are a lot of different images on the screen, most of which are accompanied by Solomon's voice-over comments, as if our guide in the small, musty world of the town he is forced to exist in: pumped-up skinhead brothers, who were members of the Jehovah's Witnesses sect and on this occasion killed their parents, who hammer each other in the kitchen in the morning.... Teenage girls who put duct tape on their nipples and ripped them off to make their breasts bigger. The ever-smiling idiot who prays to her heart's content and breastfeeds a rubber puppet. A homosexual guy (an amusing directorial cameo by Harmony Korain), stammering about his “lesbian midwife” mother, who went into menopause at 30 and grew a mustache, and in between hitting on a dwarf-looking Negro dwarf. A party of tipsy men fighting with a chair and with idiotic smiles victoriously destroying it.... All this is everyday, dirty, poor and insanely boring life of these people, some of whom do ask themselves the question - “Is it worth living?”, but always answer it the same way - “Of course...”.

The director has created on the screen a truly all-pervasive picture of total destruction along with moral and physical decay of the environment of this society. And I would say that although the film has a rather large share of American specifics, it actually raises much more general issues and themes typical of most developed countries of the modern world in general.

It is not for nothing that we are not shown a single normal person in this town - this makes it clear that such places, which make up 85% of settlements in almost any country, are simply unable to produce and bring up a normal person - the atmosphere itself does not allow it, well, and the rare happy exceptions only confirm the rule...

This is a movie that by its very existence challenges the majority, which does not want to notice anything around them, does not want to look at the world in which they live and their own place and purpose in it. This movie is not about a provincial American hole, where the dregs of society live - “white trash” as the famous and respectable American film critic Leonard Maltin called the heroes of “Gummo”, but about the general problems of existence of almost any state, the share of such individuals in the population of which is steadily increasing from year to year. People who need nothing and want nothing, who died before they were born.

And if this masterpiece does not make you think about it, then take a closer look around you ... Maybe you are already a part of Gummo...?