Barbara Kopple
Havoc

THE REVIEW

While Italian teenagers are eager to promiscuously engage with the world of thirty-somethings in the hope of floating three meters above the sky, those in the United States, accustomed to doing things big, raise the stakes. Anne Hathaway stops waiting for Prince Charming and, after being under the clutches of the Devil Wears Prada, lingers in the high society of Bel Air as the spoilt daughter Allison Lang of a busy and wealthy couple. Allison, along with her friend Emily (Bijou Phillips), decides to escape the group of friends who mimic gangster culture to join a real gang. Thus, they start frequenting the 16th street, the Latino ghetto. Here they meet Hector (Freddy Rodriguez), a tattooed criminal towards whom Allison feels a strange attraction.

During a poker game, the two request to undergo the initiation rite to join the gang, which is to roll a die: the number that comes up corresponds to the number of people with whom the two girls will have to have sex. Allison rolls a one and chooses Hector, while the unfortunate Emily rolls a three. The first decides to withdraw, while the second wants to continue, but it turns into a gang rape for her. Emily reports the incident, and Hector ends up in prison. Allison, driven by remorse, reveals to her friend's parents the true course of events and tries in vain to stop their old friends from intending to kill Hector's thugs.

Barbara Kopple, an experienced American documentarian, changes her appearance but not her habits. In fact, the film opens, unfolds, and closes with footage of a boy intent on filming the "bored youth of America." Such footage would certainly have more value if it framed a film that didn't fall apart at every turn. Ultimately, the plot is comparable to many other feature films (such as the superior "Thirteen"): a group of kids backed by money and parental support have fun even beyond certain limits without any perception of virtue or even the distinction between good and evil. They play at being bad adults, and this annoys the real bad adults, who are, in this case, the Latinos (after the Italians, strictly from the south, and after the Blacks, it's their turn...).

The award-winning director earnestly tries not to fall into banality by truly daring: she has Hathaway show her breasts, covers the initiation scene of Allison and Emily step-by-step, and doesn't spare us the stomach-churning degenerations of typical college parties. Within the same concept is one of the film's final scenes, where three boys ready to defend the stained honor of their raped friend, unaware of the backstory, burst into the gangsters' den and start shooting but find nothing but two terrified women, one of whom is clutching a baby. The three are violently confronted with the danger of their game, which would have led them to kill innocents. The golden world of "Beverly Hills" and "The O.C." is overturned to illustrate its flaws. The protagonists themselves live according to these models, as Hector chastises Allison.

Attempting to strip the problem of American youth from the heavy burden of stereotype fails, but her efforts are mere attempts, and as we know, hell is paved with good intentions. Everything is unnecessarily excessive and, in some places, sinks into outright banality, as happens with the all-hip-hop soundtrack and the scenes of unjustified brawls. A semi-successful portrayal of the new American generation, in short. The good acting by the cast "saves what's salvageable," but there's little else to do.

The film is dedicated to screenwriter Jessica Kaplan who died in a plane crash in 2003.