Dazed and Confused

Asked to nominate his favourite American film of the 90s, Quentin Tarantino chose this spot-on recreation of the last day of high school in May, 1976. The seniors debate party politics while next term’s freshmen run the gauntlet of brutal initiation rites, barely comforted by the knowledge that they’ll wield the stick one day. No one’s looking much farther ahead than that.

This has a freewheeling, ’day-in-the-life-of’ structure which allows writer/director Linklater, in his second feature, to eavesdrop on an ensemble cast without dramatic contrivance. There’s a quirky counter-cultural intelligence at work: sympathy for those on the sidelines, and a deadpan pop irony which places this among the hippest teenage movies. While the camera flits between some two dozen youngsters (played by uniformly excellent unknowns), Linklater allows himself to develop a handful of stories. There’s no nostalgia or wish-fulfillment here, but it’s seriously funny.

Once every decade or so, a movie captures the hormone-drenched, fashion- crazed, pop-song-driven rituals of American youth culture with such loving authenticity that it comes to seem a kind of anthem, as innocently giddy and spirited as the teenagers it’s about. Dazed and Confused may be the most slyly funny and dead-on portrait of American teenage life ever made.

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

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