The adolescent world is one of the great obsessions of the talented American director Gus Van Sant. And it renews its commitment to "Paranoid Park", the film presented today in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where the betting game on the coveted Palme d'Or is already beginning.
As in "Elephant", inspired by the massacre in a Columbine school and for which he won the Palme d'Or in 2003, Van Sant explores in this new film the anguish of living as teenagers who lack communication with adults, as if one and the other lived in two parallel worlds that march together but do not touch.
Death is also omnipresent in this work. But there is no homicidal fever in it. The protagonist Alex, a 16-year-old skateboarder, has accidentally killed a security guard near a skate park called Paranoid Park, a notorious place to which he went in search of thrills.