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Jun 15, 2016 By Kyle Turner Web Exclusive

“[It was] the year of the Bang Gangs,” Alex (Finnegan Oldfield) tells us over narration. This just after a flash-forward to a tracking shot through a house packed with teenagers in varying degrees of nakedness, intoxication, and debaucherousness. The title becomes self-explanatory after the shot and piece of narration, but it’s hard to discern to what degree it’s aware of its own corniness. If inner city kids transgressing the supposed bounds of all that is good and pure wasn’t really your thing in the early 1990s in America, the question for Eva Husson’s film Bang Gang ends up being, “What will make it interesting if it’s bourgeois suburban French teens?”

What exactly has changed since Larry Clark’s provocative film Kids in 1995? It’s been over two decades since that film was released, but while its approaches to adolescent sexuality, drug use, STDs, and abuse were once shocking and maybe gauche, it is hard, at least from the perspective of an American, to really transgress those boundaries anymore. New lines have been made, new bars set, and while Kids would probably be scrutinized for different reasons (its depictions of class, race, and gender are still worthy of being analyzed), there’s a certain amount of desensitization certain sectors of cultural consumers have experienced, especially those that are inclined to watch Kids or Bang Gang in the first place.

The organization of teenager sex parties or orgies is neither shocking realistically nor narratively, but what does matter is the amount of agency the film’s female characters are given and how that impacts our perception of adolescent sexuality, as well as its general role within film history in general. Though Bang Gang ostensibly sets Alex as its narrator, the film primarily focuses on friends George (Marilyn Lima) and Laetitia (Daisy Broom) and how they navigate these sex and drug addled spaces. Unfortunately, such navigation is not particularly interesting, transgressions or no.

What has changed dramatically since 1995 is the way young people engage with sex and with their own identities: the proliferation of social media has heavily impacted the way young people construct their identities, sexual and otherwise, and Bang Gang’s subtitle, A Modern Love Story might best be applied to these characters’ adoration for self-expression via metaphysical, digital means. At these orgies, internet porno is projected onto the wall, the participants unconsciously mimicking the actions in the videos. Characters take selfies, film each other having sex, live their most deviant lives as much online as in person. It’s a confirmation, not necessarily an affirmation, of these characters trying to prod what little interest in life they have left, given that, in all sectors, their engagement is at a minimum.

But this portrait of disaffected youth doing drugs and having sex feels silly in the wrong ways, with its heavy handed art house naturalism unable to sort out where and when to put its weight tonally and emotionally. A scene in which a bunch of kids are notified that they have contracted sexually transmitted diseases is played like everyone is receiving news that they have a month to live. In a post Skins, Spring Breakers, and Party Monster world, Bang Gang needs more to truly be the new Kids on the block.

Author rating: 5/10