Review of The Baby of Mâcon (1993) by Ian M — 29 May 2005

Well, I wanted "out there" and Boy, I got it! Peter Greenaway's "The Baby Of Macon" was okay, mainly a restatement of things he's said before about man's cruelty in the form of an Elizabethan play-within-a-play. Then you get to the end where he has the lead actress gang raped and the dead body of a child cut apart. You can see why nobody picked it up for distribution over here.

"Ken Park" was a bit stronger. This movie had me saying "What the fuck am I watching?" over and over again. It was about a group of California teens who have troubled relations with their parents...which is a gross understatement. One kid is having sex with his girlfriend's mom, another has his drunken father try to perform oral sex on him, a third treats his grandparents like crap and eventually stabs them both to death and the girl of the group has her father catch her in bed with a boy. Then he flips out and starts taking her to be her dead mother.

The creepiest part is that all the sexual parts are graphically shown. Director Larry Clark is notorious for having teenaged sex scenes in his movies but this time he teeters right on the edge of explicit. There are oral sex scenes and genital gropings that look extremely real and at one point, we're even treated to the sight of the grandparent-killer jacking off...to full completion.

After all this the sight of the girl and the two remaining guys havimg casual three-way sex together at the end seems like a relief. In a way that's the point. You can see how these kids are betrayed by the people who are supposed to love and protect them, and their bonding is the only respite they have. For all its creepiness, the damn movie makes sense.

I was amazed they found actors willing to do the sex stuff. I recognized the molesting father from other roles and the mother who spreads for and gropes her daughter's boyfriend is a former professional tennis player who has done other movies. Grabbing a kid's genitals and being eaten out on camera obviously didn't fase her.

I say "kid" advisedly. Obviously all these young actors are of legal age. Otherwise Larry Clark would be in jail right now. Nevertheless when you consider the furor Vincent Gallo caused for showing far less in "The Brown Bunny", it's obvious that "Ken Park" will never see the official light of day in the US.