Marfa Girl (2012) User Reviews

Eh, it's okay.

[LanceBrave · 6/10 · 1 July 2013]

Six years is a long hiatus, especially since Larry Clark was popping movies out almost annually for a while. After that much of a break, you'd expect a filmmaker to come back with something new, engaged with different subjects. But then again, this is Larry Clark we're talking about. All of his work is a variation on a theme. "Marfa Girl" takes a few new turns even if it's firmly rooted in the director's obsessions.

The title is somewhat misleading. Yeah, the movie is set in Marfa, Texas. That's not the misleading part. Instead, the movie is actually about a boy, not a girl. Fifteen year old Adam, about to turn sixteen, is the protagonist. He skates, is in a band, occasionally enjoys a pot cigarette, is friends with a sexually liberated young mother, and is currently trying to get into his girlfriend's pants. His mom rehabilitates parrots and is heavily involved in the local spiritualist and art scene. She's friends with a twenty-something artist, the titular Marfa Girl, a young lady who believes in free love and equality of genders. Connecting all the story threads is Tom, a border patrol cop with sadomasochistic fantasies, misogynistic tendencies, and an unhealthy obsession with Adam and his mom.

"Marfa Girl" is edgier then "Wassup Rockers" but is still more gentle then the majority of the director's films. As you'd expect, the film is loosely plotted, rolling from one encounter to another. The pacing is relaxed, instead of belabored. Once again, Clark has successfully put us into these kids' lives. There's not much of a score and what is there is odd, chiptune music. The film is named after its setting because Marfa is a character onto itself. It's clear that the odd mixture of artists, spiritualists, disaffected kids, and border patrol cops that makes up the town was Clark's main inspiration. After watching the film, you feel like you know what a day in the sleepy town must feel like.

As is expected with Clark by this point, among the teenage sex scenes, drugs, and violence, are genuinely touching or intriguing moments. An early moment, when Adam's mom talks with a friend about loosing pets and reincarnation, really impressed me. Though the movie seems to implicitly suggest that the whole conversation is ridiculous, the emotion the moment sums up is true. Another stand-out moment is Adam and the Marfa Girl's discussion about sexism and double standards. This leads to an encounter with two Mexican border patrol cops, starting a heated conversation. Clark continues to do intimate conversation well. The Girl has a revealing conversation with the mellower of the two cops, about his military history. An earlier date with another artist is charmingly awkward. Even the villainous Tom gets a revealing monologue near the end. Surprisingly, the sex scenes, only a few of which involve teenagers, have a gentle, romantic tone to them, making this, perhaps, Clark's first legitimately erotic film.

Adam is your standard Clark protagonist: Obsessed with sex with no clear direction in life. His sweet relationship with his Mom makes him different though. Adam Mediano has a natural charisma as an actor and it's not impossible to see him going on to a real acting career. Drake Burnette as the titular character does very well, being spunky and lovable. She can't make all her heavy dialogue work but the actress is still likable. I didn't care for what happens to her in the last act though. That felt unnecessary. I especially liked Indigo Rael as Adam's friend Donna. She's a complex character, a mother, a teen, and sexually open. Mary Farley is also strong as Adam's mom.

Tom is the most fascinating character in the film. He's a total creep. Aside from needlessly harassing Adam, he makes sexist remarks to a young waitress, tricks a fast food clerk into a date that transforms into a possible sexual assault, and shows Adam's mom disturbing "blue waffle" pictures. For most of the film, he comes off as a thinly developed villain. His eventual acts of violence and sexual assault aren't surprising. Frankly, his admittance of getting turned on by violence is awkwardly presented and Clark falling back on shock value and boners. However, the character's monologue, were he discusses his past and his relationship with his father, are oddly powerful. Jeremy St. James actually gives a fantastic performance, making Tom an ugly creep but also, oddly easy to watch.

The movie concludes with violence. You could say this is lazy. However, the middle section of the movie, which includes a long drug trip in a school gym, drags on. The whole movie sets up this conflict between Adam and Tom. The ending is a fine pay-off to this. The resolution puts a nice emotional bow on the story.

So "Marfa Girl" is about half/half. It's a lot of the same stuff you'd expect from the director by now. Its dreamy tone is sometimes entrancing, sometimes boring. The script is unbalanced between captivating character study and directionless location piece. I both like the town and have no desire to ever visit it. All things considered, it's what I would expect from the director at this point in his career.

Clark released the movie independently as a streaming rental through his website, with no intention of ever releasing it to theaters or home video. He hopes to reach the kids this way. Maybe he will. I don't know what young people will think out of "Marfa Girl." It won't change detractors mind and it could potentially either surprise or bore Clark defenders. Despite it's issues, it's still the filmmaker's best work in years.

Disappointing and lackluster comeback for Larry Clark

[RichardvonLust · 4/10 · 28 April 2013]

After our mind blowing experiences with Bully and Ken Park I was expecting something much better than Marfa Girl could deliver. It seems that Larry Clark has taken the old 20th. Century criticisms of Ken Park to heart and toned down his productions to a level of mechanized banality. And the result simply doesn't work.

The central characters are a community of Spanish Americans living somewhere in the deep south west who are driven to a point of madness by the mindless tedium of their existence. Adam is 16 and hangs around with a group of talentless drop out musicians and artists who spend their days drug taking, fornicating and banging instruments. The local policeman is a psycho maniac who gets turned on by pain whilst Adam's mother searches for cosmic vibes with pet birds and sound mediums.

So far so good. But I'm afraid that's all there is. The plot is virtually non existent, the acting is labored and the dialog is almost incoherent. Of course, as with all Larry Clark films, the cast were all able to shed their clothes and copulate in front of the crew. We are treated to six young male naked backsides pounding up and down so convincingly that I doubt it was simulated. Larry Clark certainly had a good time watching their convulsions but this time he doesn't share it with the audience. Unlike Ken Park there is no shocking full on ejaculation to trade mark the production with crystal realism. In fact there isn't even an erect male full frontal to express the degradation of it all. All such visible stirrings are this time kept firmly within the lad's boxer shorts. So Larry Clark has finally descended into Hollywoodesque coyness with all the well ploughed banality and tedium that oh so common genre forces upon us. Yawn.

controversial

[trashgang · 5/10 · 23 February 2015]

Larry Clark the director of this flick became notorious for a few reasons. He is known to use non-actors in his flick. For most parts he did. He just picked up teenagers from the street and let them act in his flicks. But what the teenagers had to do was shocking for some. His first flick Kids (1995) made in full grunge bloom he let kids under-aged smoke cigarettes. It shocked the world back then but it put his name on the map. From there on he made the still unreleased flick in the US, Ken Park (2002). Again teenager were picked from the street to perform sexual acts on-camera. Teenage Caveman (2002) was another perfect example.

Always the theme in his flicks are youth skating around and bore themselves a lot. It shows in this picture that not all is the American dream. This flick takes place on borderland. You know what you will get, the typical Romeo And Juliette situations. But here Larry Clark goes a bit further. Were he wasn't afraid to show naked breasts from teenagers (always above 18) here in Marfa Girl I was surprised that they go all the way this time with even boner shots. It's all just on the edge of getting in trouble as filmmaker but he still does it and was never sentenced or whatsoever.

Of course the border patrol has the annoying cop who never got laid with the ones crossing the border and he's out to catch some chica available for his needs. You can see it coming that it turns out wrong. It's just a depressive flick were teenagers are doing it with each other because there's nothing else to do...

This isn't a flick for everybody due a lot of blah blah going on and some music being made by the teenagers also going on for ever and of course the nudity shown. Were Ken Park did had a good story here it hasn't. But it's out there if you want to see were Larry is famous for.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 2/5 Effects 0/5 Story 0/5 Comedy 0/5

Dude, where's my script?

[Seth_Rogue_One · 1/10 · 5 September 2016]

Is probably something that mr. Larry Clark asked his assistant when he was on set to start film this, and seemingly they never found it and had to make up something on the spot.

'Bully (2001)' was a great movie, directed by him but after that he hasn't done anything remotely as good... 'Wassup Rockers (2005)' despite poor acting was still decent because it had at least somewhat of a plot where as this does not and seem to aimlessly just go to events that lead to teenagers getting naked.

Now granted, I don't believe Larry Clark has done a movie where teenagers don't get naked but really with this one I seriously started to wonder if he did this film for the sole reason of getting off on the nude teens with multiple crotch-shots (male and female)...

It sure couldn't be because he thought he had a good story to tell.

One of the characters says 'if people f'd more there would be no war. Less killing, less rape, you know what I mean?'. The character has some similarities to Larry Clark (it's an artist who likes to paint guys genitals, much like Clark himself is an artist who likes to film them) so that seems like a way for Clark to justify his fascination with teenagers sex lives, and possibly a (poor) attempt at giving some depth into a hollow movie.

A sequel is listed for being in the making for next year, I don't see how they expect to make any money off of that, but maybe Clark doesn't care and he just want to film some more naked teenagers.

There was a time when he was seen as a talented director who was slightly perverted, but it's quickly turning to him being seen as a perverted director who's slightly talented instead.

I think he need to do a full 360 if he want to turn that around, maybe make a movie about adults instead or if the teenage thing have to continue let them keep their clothes on and focus on a good story instead, and maybe a cast that have acting experience.

Larry.... why not?

[tjwcreations · 7/10 · 29 August 2018]

Eh. Kinda interesting. Some good writing. Some good scenes. Some interesting. Some not so interesting. Classic Larry Clark themes done well.

It's clear this movie basically does what it wants - which is fine by me. But y'know, that doesn't always makes for the best film or sometimes it does. The acting in places is very naturalistic, in others forced but overall it creates a good feel for the town and it's people. I guess this is what it was going for so well done.

I don't think this has the lasting impression KEN PARK had on me but it has graphic sex, teenagers talking about sex, skateboarding, smoking weed. Who am I to complain? Clark, at this point, just makes art and I just watched it. It feels stupid even rating it or writing this review.

Well done LC keep up the good work.

Larry Clark at his worst

[fellini_58701 · 1/10 · 6 October 2015]

Pretentious boring and who cares, I could not believe this film won the best film prize at the 2012 Rome film festival it must have been a bad year for films in the official competition. The film about bored teenagers in El Paso, TX who look like there were ripped off Calvin Kline a fashion ad, bad acting bad sex, and of course stereotyping border patrol agents as bad people who are to get you and make life miserable. Larry Clark should learn from his greater film like Kids and Bully and remember when he could actually make films and not bore audiences to death. nothing much to say about a film with nothing much to tell.

"A series of unrelated conversations punctuated by rolls in the hay"

[vismao9 · 7/10 · 5 April 2015]

...is what seems this film is striving for at first. Ignoring Larry Clark's notorious reputation of a cinematic perv and exploiter of young, underweight and under aged non-actors (quoted: I wondered about the availability of porn everywhere and how it affected what they thought about sex, what it was, what influence it had...). He makes films about specific not-for-everybody subjects and does not hide his fascination by it. Fair enough. The problem here is not weather to approve or disapprove Clark's fetishistic obsession by young & aimless, beautiful & doomed, or his over the top raw shots of them having sex, doing drugs or shooting people (Kids, Ken Park, Wassup Rockers prepared us for it) but his stubborn persistence in denying the strength and the possible depth of the material.His lazy semi- documentaristic approach makes it all more so interesting, just that it feels as if he's not in control of the outcome...And that can be tricky if you're dealing with such cold-blooded realism. Though amazing cinematography and mood cover for the lack of narrative and acting force, Clark likes to show off his talent in photography and lets his story suffer for it.

Marfa girl revolves around a half-Mexican charismatic 16 yr- old skater boy in a self-titled town in Texas, which is another character of the movie. Located on the border of US and Mexico it is the perfect setting for all kinds of weird stories and conflicts. The mixture of locals and outsiders, "breeds" and racist psychopaths, like the patrol officer Tom played by Jeremy St. James. He is a savage and brutal sociopath that, for some inexplicable reason, gets away with everything, whether showing Adam's Mom "blue waffle" pictures or abusing every single person he meets. As we learn by the end, he is in pathological relationship with pain, weather inflicted upon him or on other people... So called "circle of violence" that goes on until something really bad happens. Though St. James' performance is great and believable in every second, I find the character in the end abruptly degraded and pushed to fit the plot assignment, pretty much like the rest of them. Marfa girl, misleading "main character" of the film played by the fresh model (what else) Drake Burnette is like a patch for the others, bringing in a breeze of fresh air and liberation from their established patterns and beliefs, but coming off more as snobby and reckless then true and free spirited. She is an Artist in residence, white and privileged but nevertheless doomed and lost as her fellow townies. Maybe that's the part I feel the most ambivalent about in Clark's films. The fact he doesn't really give any chance to his characters. As if in his eyes they are all losers by birth certificate.

There are two amazing sequences in the film that made me think it would take it to a whole new level. One is an off-beat dialogue between Adam's mother and Mexican spiritual woman and her brother, involving dead parrots and their emotional bondage with them. As weird as it may sound, this was the most genuine and natural part of the film. Second one is the sequence between the Marfa girl and young Adam where she tries to pass on her liberal, kind of feminist, values of free love and double standards in male/female relations. It's the talk that feels more natural then all the stiffed sex scenes and unnecessary violence in the end. It also shows that the actors are not really that bad or inexperienced but, actually, well directed, portraying true awkwardness of the outsiders- inhabitants of the infamous American canal. I really loved those seemingly effortless dives into complexities, coming from faces of Dazed and Confused magazine covers...I am more interested in seeing their emotional landscape,their quirky philosophies and thoughts on life then the platitude of sex, drugs and violence that fits the frame all too familiar.They are all kids (with less edge than the original "Kids") and their paths are still not determined, in spite of their aimlessness and utter lack of interest and integrity.

The end result feels as if that no-future philosophy of ghost town and its Martian Marfa citizens, so pointedly and viscerally portrayed, was forced into some kind of a tragedy just to fulfill the plot assignment.Too bad Clarke didn't feel it was worthy of more thorough investigation, or maybe he found it boring comparing to visually more satisfying exploration of his fantasies.

Had potential, but squanders it

[grantss · 2/10 · 8 August 2015]

Had potential, but squanders it.

A movie set in a small Texas town, near the border with Mexico. Follows a few characters in their dull, everyday lives, and how they are all affected by the presence of the Border Patrol.

The movie had heaps of potential, especially with regard to the issue of illegal immigration in the US. How this affects race relations, especially with Hispanic people, was also a great possibility.

However, while it touches on these issues, there is no real, or at least thoughtful, examination. The movie might as well have been set in the middle of the US in an all-white community it was so superficial.

The setting is really just a vehicle for a random, pointless plot (and I use the word "plot" very broadly here). The conclusion is quite impactful, but it almost doesn't have a context, what goes before is so unfocused.

Many of the scenes are there just for shock value, but you expect nothing less from writer-director Larry Clark (director of Kids, Bully and Ken Park).

Dialogue often consists of long monologues, telling some tale of personal woe but with no real context, interspersed with simplistic, pop, cereal-box philosophy. It often feels like you're watching someone being interviewed for a documentary, especially when that someone doesn't really want to be there.

Throw in performances that vary from OK to utter rubbish and you have an incredibly poor movie. Some of the performances are among the worst I have ever seen in a movie (and I've seen some of Kristen Stewart's movies...). Lindsay Jones as the teacher is mind-bogglingly bad.

Avoid.

Let's talk about Sex

[kosmasp · 5/10 · 20 December 2018]

Well there is one scene/segment in the movie that could easily be called that. It may be even called that in the scene selection - it would make sense. Apart from that, if you know Larry Clarke you know what to expect. Nudity, intercourse, swearing, violence and general drama.

Families are torn apart, but there is a lot of talking, a lot of social criticism. If you are into that, this can be enjoyable. Much of what is said, is supposed to shock though and if you are not bigotted, it may just seem obvious. Now it may sound a bit weird that a man of Clarkes age is still doing movies about the youth and the discovery of sexuality. You'll either find this refreshing or weird. Whatever the case you know what to expect

Not sure there is a spoiler but just in case

[richard_longman · 8/10 · 25 November 2012]

Larry Clark likes to make movies which shock. Particularly about teenagers. They f*ck and swear and sometimes kill (Bully). On the other hand, William Golding's Lord of the Flies is on the reading list in most English language high schools around the world. Nothing Larry Clark has done can outdo the horror of those kids on an island.

Homo sapiens are a brutal and savage species, probably responsible for the elimination of Neanderthal man and since then we have sent thousands of species into extinction, from mammoths, to bison, to the dodo. If there's a bad animal around, we're it.

Clark like Golding is busy with representing the what is, ripping off of your rose-coloured glasses and then stomping on them to boot. Yes, your girlfriend in high school betrayed you. Deliberately. And your son's girlfriend is probably betraying him now too. It's just what people do. Your wife probably cheated on you at least once or twice too. Go and read Jane Goodall's study of chimpanzees: how they mate and how they stalk their neighbours and kill.

Anyway back to Marfa Girl: it's the same unlikeable group of teenagers smoking up and screwing as we've seen in other Clark movies. This time it's on the US/Mexican border. There are some very dislikable adult border patrol officers and some slightly less dislikable promiscuous kids. It's a film about ideas and loyalties. There are some extended Socratian dialogues between kids and cops, cops and cops.

Those ideas are played out through the bodies and lives of the Clark's kids. Unlike in a Rohmer film, ideas are not apart from human existence. Ideas have a real human price.

Performances are convincing all round from mothers to daughters to cops. I really didn't like either Adam (Adam Mediano) or Marfa Girl (Drake Burnette). But that's not their job to make me like them. Their responsibility is to play their role convincingly and that they did.

If you are looking to be uplifted or dream of a brighter tomorrow, no Larry Clark film is for you. If you are looking to take a cold hard look at today's passage from childhood to adulthood, Larry Clark is your man.

I'm not sure I liked Marfa Girl, but I respect the craft. Anyone concerned with border issues will find a lot to think about. There's a tall pile of DVD's of films waiting more important to me than Marfa Girl. While I respect Larry Clark's craft (I was lucky enough to see a premiere of Bully at TIFF with Clark in attendance in 2001), one of the reasons I am among the first to watch and buy is its direct online distribution. Direct digital distribution is the only future for independent film. Larry Clark is both wise and brave to choose exclusively online digital distribution with no cut to iTunes or any other of the conglomerates.

It's an experiment worth supporting. If works the quality and the honesty of Marfa Girl are what direct distribution brings us, the future of independent film looks brighter than it has in over ten years.

If you are on the fence, please give Larry Clark your support to send a clear signal to both independent film makers and to Hollywood. Give us something better than the sequels and focus grouped rubbish which commercial filmmaking has become and we'll pay for it.

The online viewing experience was very easy. You pay via Paypal with no extended offer nonsense or other advertising and you get a login key which lets you see Marfa Girl in very good quality HD right away. Absolutely no problem playing it in the browser.

Comeback? Com'mon!

[sdp4462 · 2/10 · 8 January 2014]

*This review may contain a spoiler, so perhaps you do not want to read it before seeing the film, but I have kept this sufficiently vague, in my view.

I have to comment on another reviewer who wrote that this film represents Larry Clark's disappointing and lackluster comeback film. I have not known any of Larry Clark's filmography. I do not believe I have seen a single one, so I was a bit surprised Mr. Clark had a comeback to make. Mr. Clark is foreign to me and the actors are also completely unknown, which has the added bonus of keeping production costs low, but seems to degrade the overall quality of the film. Sometimes I even felt as though the actors were searching for lines or emotions, but did not know where to look. Perhaps the director had stepped out for the moment.

No doubt, I am equally foreign to this film. I considered stopping the film 5 or 10 minutes in because my initial reaction was one of bewilderment (why are these people in this film?) and one of disgust (why are these border patrol agents harassing a young, and why is a teacher, moments later, spanking him in a school room with a paddle fashioned out of wood). By foreign I felt as though I was in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, playing the role of Gregor Samsa. The world I see portrayed in Marfa Girl is totally foreign to me. It is a world with brutal quasi-police forces who prey upon the public. It is a place where all hope is lost and where people turn to spiritual healing for some substitute of courage and intellect. It's a world where the only place to find entertainment is apparently in a semi-abandoned apartment complex/RV park where teenagers are dancing dispassionately to music of a guitar strummer and a kid with an electronic sound board. More fascinating is why anyone would want to visit this southern border town. The young artist known as Marfa Girl (played by model Drake Burnette) mixes with the locals like oil to water when she suggests to one man that he should model nude for her sketches. I nearly laughed, but instead wondered why he didn't slap her coming on to a taken man in an ultra-conservative town in America.

Admittedly, part of my foreign feeling toward this film lies in my lack of relativity to the main character, whose mother at one point reminds him that although lightly browned, he is "not a wetback." Admittedly, in my K-12 years I didn't fall into bed with older women/moms, I didn't roam aimlessly around my little middle-American town, and I didn't grow up in a place where I was treated as if I belonged to another species on another planet. Young people go through difficult times as adolescents; we get that. Young people do and say stupid things, and we get that as well. It's just that Clark does not quite bring this one home for me. Even at the end, I was still searching for something to cling to, but could not find it. Indeed, the reason for this review might very well be the fact that the film was so forgettable that I had to write down my thoughts lest I forget about it tomorrow.

You might have wondered from where the film's title is derived. It turns out that the title is taken from the very real town in which the film is set, Marfa, Texas. As if the film had not turned me off the place, a review of Google Maps and Wikipedia resources suggests that it is a place on Earth that I am highly unlikely to ever find myself. No doubt, I am better off for steering clear, and you are better off for skipping this film.

What a disgusting piece of filth!

[carter-drewj · 1/10 · 15 July 2015]

This movie drags human sexuality through a very filthy gutter.

Once again Hollywood glorifies illegal aliens, demonizes border guards who try to stem the tide!

This movie treats men, women and sex as if they were all on filthy euro heroin!

A True piece of Hollywood Filth!

Spanking seems to be a fetish with Mr. Clark, how many of You were spanked by Your junior high school Teacher?

Every filthy dirty thought a teenager ever had is played out over a stark West Texas Landscape!

An Ugly Film for Ugly Minded People!

What the hell happened to Larry Clark?

[PIST-OFF · 1/10 · 26 March 2021]

Back in the late 90s and early 2000's Larry Clark came out with some movie that ventured between good and great, but no matter the quality they were always at least interesting. Kids was spectacular and Bully for all it's leering overkill was at least an interesting study of youth gone horribly horribly wrong. Here we have Marfa Girl a loose assortment of sex scene as directionless as it's teen protagonist tied only very loosely together by a shoe-horned in generic evil white guy sex fiend. Even this thin subplot doesn't quite hang together, let alone support the surrounding sex scenes. No character in this movie is even remotely likable. Everyone comes off as shallow and following a set of directives unnatural to human interaction. The movie even starts on a dud. Clark has always been about using non-actors in his movies and usually it works out well, or at least well enough. At the beginning of the movie is a contrived scene with a teacher who's line readings are so bad you wonder if there's an off camera man with a gun pointed at her. What follows is an aimless 100 minutes in which even the sight of naked girls becomes tedious. With a mid movie break to hear the idiotic philosophies of the titular Marfa Girl. Can a person be that stupid? Can people pass the age of 14 really believe such utopian garbage? Nobody with half a brain should take this moron seriously. Then there is the aforementioned generic evil white man with a secret. Why is it that movies never seem to find that cliche or sterotype tiresome. I think I have an answer. Larry Clark really just needs to admit to himself that he would like to direct pornographic movies starring the youngest actors and actresses the law will allow and never waste our time pretending he's a director with anything to say about anything.

Not worth !

[jindalsaurabh-79309 · 1/10 · 24 August 2021]

I didn't like it. No story , no acting , no direction . Please don't waste your time.

It's simply great to have Larry Clark back, in full-force nonetheless

[StevePulaski · 8/10 · 7 January 2014]

It's hard to believe that it was seven long years between the release of Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers and Marfa Girl. Clark's themes of destructive adolescent behavior, broken families, and teenage angst and sex are now more prominent than ever, and one would assume that Clark would be toying with every possible convention for the material in present times, when censorship restrictions is now far more liberal than it ever has been. However, Clark claims there is still apprehension towards his kind of material from "crooked Hollywood distributors," which is why he made the decision to release Marfa Girl on his website, with no plans of it ever coming to DVD or being released in theaters.

It's sad when a man of Clark's caliber must resort to the broad and indistinguishable realm of online distribution to get his films seen but maybe that's for the better. He is not limited by any means, is his own boss, and still possesses the freedom to make the movies he wants to make. As a writer, I can respect that immensely. His film Marfa Girl could mistakenly be called a "return to form" for Clark, due to his lengthy absence, but just by watching the film you know he hasn't left. His last feature Wassup Rockers, however, felt nothing as much as a watered-down depiction of what Clark does best, which is handle the aforementioned themes.

Marfa Girl concerns the town of Marfa, Texas, which is near the border of the United States and Mexico. The town is as sleepy as can be, often possessing a dreamy quality with its wide open spaces, soft blue skies, and frequently humble, muted colors. It concerns a number of people living in this town, mostly working class characters, one of whom is a teenager named Adam (Adam Mediano), a sixteen-year-old who is approaching his seventeenth birthday in a matter of days. He is beginning to become sexually curious, hoping to get lucky with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Inez (Mercedes Maxwell), who he trusts completely, but also being tempted with sex from numerous other people, including his twentysomething neighbor.

The titular character is played by Drake Burnette, a local artist who also looks to have sex with Adam. The film's powerhouse scene comes when Adam and her talk about sex beginning when Adam is in the bathtub and continues when the two walk out in public. The scene touches on every topic of sex, from pleasing a woman sexually to elaborating on the unfair double-standard of when a man or a woman have many sexual partners. It wasn't until I saw this scene did I recall how much I missed Clark's naturalistic conversations and his characters' curiosity and interest in sex. Clark doesn't stray from making the dialogs explicit as well, with both characters going into intricate detail about the mysterious ways of a woman's clitoris.

A subplot involves Tom (Jeremy St. James), a lowly, misogynistic border patrol agent who sets his sights on Adam, Adam's mother (Mary Farley), along with Inez. St. James does great work here as a first-time actor, effectively creating an unsettling atmosphere whenever he steps on screen. His character Tom is an unpredictable one, with an early scene with him taking place at a restaurant where he remarks to a waitress about how her feet wouldn't hurt if she didn't have such gigantic breasts. Tom is a scummy character, doing a thankless job to boot. It isn't until Burnette's mysterious character strikes a conversation with two of Tom's Mexican coworkers, questioning if they feel guilty in any way for arresting their own people. The scene, which takes place inside an abandoned warehouse, is equally tense and unsettling, perhaps providing subtle commentary about how every encounter, no matter how trivial or meaningless, with the border patrol is in some way.

Despite the seven year gap, Clark stills seems to be interested in the Latino, "skater-punk" lifestyle. Frequent scenes involve some sort of skateboarding, gathering, or languorously wandering the streets of Marfa. Cinematographer David Newbert knows how to capture the look and appeal of a sleepy town, tucked away down in Texas. The dreaminess of the film's aesthetic is something that I can't easily shake, similar to the gritty and dirty aesthetic utilized in Clark's previous films.

Clark's directorial debut is Kids, which is not only one of the most powerful debut films I have yet to see but one of the most powerful films that I have yet to see. Its honest depiction of teenagers and the degradation of values is something scarcely brought up but brilliantly handled overall, making for an exceptional debut film. He went on to direct Bully, a film showing murder for the sick, sadistic crime that it is, and not cheaply portraying or exploiting its subject for something to laugh at or for cheap shock. Marfa Girl tackles the familiar themes of Clark's earlier works, and while that could easily be turned into a criticism rather than a strength (Clark is seventy and maybe should look into other themes), seeing something like this particular film makes me glad to have him back and know that he won't be limited in his approach any longer.

Starring: Adam Mediano, Mercedes Maxwell, Drake Burnette, Jeremy St. James, and Mary Farley. Directed by: Larry Clark.

Love you Larry Clark.

[gigifoo · 10/10 · 23 November 2019]

OMFG. I cannot believe I just saw this the other night on Amazon Prime. How did I miss it earlier? Hard core Larry Clark. Exploring the sexual awakenings of a teenage boy. 16 plus 1 spanking for you naughty boy. Loved it.