***½/****
starring Tate Buck, Dirk Cowan, Matthew Faber, Mary Nichols
written and directed by Laurel Nakadate
by Alex Jackson In the first five to ten minutes of Laurel Nakadate's Stay the Same Never Change, a beautiful blonde teenage girl eats a bowl of Trix in a surreally white kitchen. Nakadate gives us a series of close-ups of lips moist with milk and cutaways to the Trix box art. We then see the girl lounging around in her pyjamas, sometimes watching TV but mostly doing pretty much nothing at all. While she doesn't do anything overtly sexual, there is something almost pornographic about the attention Nakadate throws upon her. The girl's innocence and her sensuality are inextricable from one another: she's sexy when she eats breakfast cereal and she's sexy when she watches TV; everything she does or doesn't do renders her a sexual object and she is all the sexier for not really realizing it. Nakadate seems to have found a fresh and absurdly funny way of illustrating the Lolita problem, whereby sexuality provides young women more power than they know what to do with. Once this sequence is over, she switches to lower-resolution video and puts her non-actors in nakedly goofy scripted scenes. One teenager drowns her teddy bear. Another dresses up as the Hulk and rolls around on the floor. A third creates a muscle-bound love doll and takes him to the drive-in to see Evan Almighty. Because they're talking now, her girls are no longer aesthetic objects and the juice drains out of the picture. But they aren't actual people, either. Nakadate doesn't evince any clear idea of what she wants to accomplish in these scenes and her cast's line readings are flat and mechanical. The film acquires an amateurish quality that appears to fit one's preconceptions of what bad movies are like. Yet this amateurishness is perhaps even more interesting than the arty first sequence, in that the horror inherent in the material is effectively neutralized. Nakadate introduces an ephebophilic kidnapper early in the film, but he is portrayed as neither a manifestation of a subconscious death wish nor a metaphor for the destructive forces of adulthood. He's just a loser. If Nakadate establishes in her virtuoso prologue the Midas touch of pretty teenage girls, where their every gesture vibrates with subsumed erotic tension, the hyper-banality of the rest of her film manages to push that notion to its breaking point.
