Review of Blue Spring (2001) by Saskia D — 01 Oct 2008

"Blue Spring" is one of the most consistently malevolent and nihilistic movies I've ever seen. Set on a "campus" that looks like a dilapidated inner city block of council flats covered with twice as much graffiti as the toilets of the university where I work, it depicts the intense rivalries of a bunch of worthless teens with "vague dreams" fighting to get up their gang's pecking order and humiliating those lower down in an all-year-round hazing session.

Not much studying seems to be going on, with irrelevant teachers droning on as boys enter and leave the room, eat their lunches, throw stuff at the blackboard, sleep on their tables or vandalize them. Kids rule and have things their way, spending their time smoking, adding to the graffiti, playing the guitar, and beating each other's teeth out with baseball bats. At best, they chill around, being useless. As worst, they just go psychopathic and stab their mates to death in the toilets.

"Blue Spring" contains strong language and scenes of extreme sadism and graphic scatology, spiced up by the most raucous and grating rock music ever heard outside of Russia. Apart from the brilliant camera work, a transparent allegory about blooming flowers and a few more light-hearted moments involving a dwarf gardener, those 82 minutes of aimless teenage angst add up to a very unpleasant experience that made me sick to my stomach.

Cinematically speaking, it's at least a four-star movie. But I couldn't give it more than one star for its content.