Kaboom

Indie-gay Japanese-American Gregg Araki loves to make controversial movies featuring sexy teenage bodies. Luckily, he also knows how to choose a cast of competent as well as attractive actors. Their efforts for his eleventh and latest (2010) romp, a comic fantasy entitled Kaboom, helped to earn him the Cannes film festival's first-ever Queer Palm.

"The Queer Palm will recognize one film for its contribution to lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender issues.

Cannes, whose 63^rd edition runs for 10 days in a town along the French Riviera starting May 12, was the largest European film festival to lack a gay prize. The Berlin Film Festival's annual Teddy Award first debuted in 1987, while the Queer Lion has been recognizing gay-themed films screened at the Venice Film Festival since 2007."

To keep such awards in perspective, it should also be noted that Cannes has presented a Palme D'Or counterpart, the Palm Dog (for the best canine performance) since 2001, with Boss from Tamara Drewe winning in 2010.

Araki wrote all but one of his movie's screenplays, and has not yet replicated the critical success of his ninth feature, Mysterious Skin. That 2004 film won awards galore, in large part due to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's co-starring performance. The child actor and former TV sitcom star (3rd Rock from the Sun) played a sexually and psychologically confused character well.

Araki may have hoped that Kaboom's male lead would provide similar magic and luck, casting another experienced child actor and TV regular (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Heroes, Terminator), Thomas Dekker, as sexually malleable "Smith". With his trimmed stubble, glittering blue eyes and schoolboyish carnal charm, he could be viewed physically and figuratively as a young (18-year-old) messiah in a tale of college youth discovering each other's sexual organs.

Dekker re-hired his favourite actor, very-mixed-blood James Duval, to play a spaced-out character actually called Messiah, and imported Roxane Mesquida (Catherine Breillat's favourite actress) to emote as Lorelei, a witch and lustful temptress for Smith's fag-haggy lesbian best friend, mean-eyed sarcastic Stella (Haley Bennett). An English actress, Juno Temple (daughter of director Julien), is "London", a laid-back British student prepared to lay out on Smith and straighten him up.

But Smith still has eager eyes for his dumb jock of a room-mate, Thor (TV actor Chris Zylka, obliged to display all his big muscles and meaty buns), and is net-chatting a real gay character (Brennan Mejia), despite being side-tricked by London into sharing a birthday fuck with Thor's hunky buddy (muscular TV bit-parter Andy Fisher-Price).

All of the actors are visibly over their supposed college age, suggesting that it was tricky to get, or obtain approval to employ, teenage actors for full-dorsal (male) and full-breasted (female) fake orgasms, of which there are various full-face examples for audiences to emulate. There are also some well-photographed older adult bodies in bright-coloured side-plotlets.

The occasionally hilarious (and sometimes intentionally so) screenplay cries out to be treated as a freaky frolic dreamed up between puffs, snorts and sucks. Its ending is beyond a joke though, ensuring that the film achieves the juvenile self-set task of being the first movie to blend soft-porn, horror, scifi, lesbian, gay, youth, Christian and Oedipal themes. The young actors' names will be worth following, but Araki has become an old-fashioned agent provocateur of his so-called New Queer cinema.