The early, less commercial one... (Clerks (DVD))

Member Name: andrewl

Product:	Clerks (DVD)
Date:	01/05/04 (34 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: dialogue, performances

Disadvantages: soundtrack, editing, 'lame bits'

Clerks was cult director Kevin Smith's first film. Shot in black and white, on a miniscule budget, with a surprisingly large cast that blatantly consists almost entirely of the crew's friends and family (many of them playing several parts throughout the film), Clerks essentially acts as a Smith starter pack.

Detailing a day in the life of shop workers Randall and Dante, almost everything in the film is familiar to those who (like me, I'm ashamed to confess) only began watching Kevin Smith films with Dogma. The script is full of jokes about oral sex, and very little else. Veteran drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob are, well, they're also making jokes about oral sex, but they also provide the requisite drug gags. Film nerdery is rife, from a shot of Randall falling to his knees in ecstatic worship of a superior video store, to the Starsky and Hutch moment as the two friends roll over the bonnet of a car.

So, blowjobs, dope and geeky stuff. Did Kevin Smith just spring out of his cot as a fully-fledged auteur or something? So far, this all seems frighteningly consistent, which suggests either a lack of development or a terrifying genius.

But relax. Clerks is strikingly different to everything that Kevin Smith has since produced. If Chasing Amy was his most artistically accomplished film, then Clerks is certainly the most artistically ambitious. The story is chopped up into chapters with pretentious intertitles. 'Catharsis' is possibly the best example. Smith is not the first director to attempt to divide his work in such a way. The scary thing is that this ninety minute epic of nob jokes and more nob jokes is closest in visual style to Jean-Luc Godard's famous pseudo-documentary of Parisian prostitution, Vivre Sa Vie. Beyond the intertitles and the black and white filming, many of Kevin Smith's shots come across as at least vaguely Godardian (the shot in the car as Randall and Dante drive to an old girlfriend's
funeral is a reverse pendulum shot swinging from side to side as the characters speak but only ever showing the back of their heads, near identical to the first scene of Vivre Sa Vie), and the characters' habit of abandoning the plot to go into a lengthy cod-philosophical digression is also reminiscient of the French artist. And then there's that cheeky habit of referencing other people's films all the time. Gosh, I've convinced myself.

The problem is that it's just not as good as Godard, or indeed as good as any of Smith's other films, including the terrifyingly self-indulgent Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. Clerks is ultimately an irrelevant and even slightly boring film. Of course, this is kind of the point, we are meant to empathise with the futile and circular lives of characters working in dead-end jobs, and shake our heads at their half-hearted attempts to escape the trap they have found themselves in.

And we do. We get the point. Nothing is going to change for Randall and Dante, and we are left with an overwhelming sense that they are going to repeat their juvenile adventures for months or even years before they move on - it's like a stoned 20-something rewrite of Waiting for Godot.

But on the other hand, none of those juvenile adventures ever really go anywhere. The promising spectacle of a rooftop hockey match ends in moments when the players lose their ball. We hear all about a catastrophe at a funeral party, but never see it. There is no progression whatsoever. You can never feel sorry for Randall, the bright young man wasting his life, as he's such an irritating self-pitying character to begin with. Fan favourites Jay and Silent Bob keep popping up, but they are mere ciphers here, nob gag spewing machines with a nice sideline in homely advice, rather than the iconic comic bunglers that would be delineated perfectly in the sequel, Mallrats.

Technical things such as sound quality are also
patchy here, yet another sign of budgetary limitations (which were presumably also why we never saw the funeral or the hockey match). Various rock songs prop up the soundtrack intermittently, but they never add much to the film and frankly are only likely to alienate the small part of the audience aged over 35 who hasn't already been offended by the continual oral sex fetish.

The area where Clerks scores extremely highly, however, is with its observational comedy. As Dante and Randall discuss 'stupid things customers do', the film lurches into life as a finely-tuned satire of shoppers' behaviour. Like almost every other student in the country, I've served my time behind cash registers, and all the oddball antics are worryingly plausible. Yes, even and especially the man who spends whole mornings looking for the perfect box of eggs. Some of the other things that are flagged, I've probably done myself. The obsessive search to find the carton of milk with a longer 'use by' date has gripped most of us at one time or another, and maybe there's an egg fetishist reading this as well. I shall spare your blushes.

This aspect of the film, rooted so firmly in the realities of menial public sector work, is dazzling in its brilliance. I know nothing about Kevin Smith's past, but I can only assume he worked in a video shop. My own cinema experience lead me wincing in sympathy with customer queries such as the all time classic: 'Have you got that film with that guy who was in that other film?'

Because this IS the reality of that kind of job. All you do is stand around, bored out of your mind, mocking customers. The appeal of Clerks is the deliciously rude Randall, who comes out and says all the things that till operators joke about in staffrooms and when the shops are quiet.

In short, Clerks is a flawed but very watchable film, so long as you are not easily offended. Its ambition and its dialogue s
hine through some unfortunate production failings to reveal a young film-maker ready to go on to much better things.

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