Harmony Korine
Harmony Korine, Writer and Director of Gummo (1997), shares an inside to the world of glue-sniffing, sex-hungry, foul-mouthed teens living on just enough to get by in the their junkyard hometown of Ohio, abandoned from a recent tornado disaster. Gummo captures the life stories of various characters throughout the town, yet specifically focuses upon two teenage boys, played by Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton, and three sisters, played by Chloë Sevigny, Darby Dougherty, and Clarissa Glucksman. The incorporation of home videos, and slowly sung lullabies, Christian and satanic music as ambience in the film portrays the cold rawness of humanity within these characters, and the darkness within the beauty of a human’s natural need to be desired.
Korine has not one scene played safe in this film — Dummo carries a plotless storyline of delusional characters in this environmentally hazardous, criminal town with no societal systems, where murdering animals for money, drug abuse, racism, misogyny and rape are socially acceptable. Harmony Korine had no need to integrate a beginning, middle, or an end; for the film had its own series of twisted events, which provided the viewers a personal lens into world of Gummo, without mocking or romanticizing their lack of education or grip of reality, but showing us how it simply was in these characters’ desolate yet hoarded worlds.
Gummo
director HARMONY KORINE
year 1997
director of photography JEAN-YVES ESCOFFIER
cast CHLOE SEVIGNY, JACOB REYNOLDS, JACOB SEWELL, NICK SUTTON
Text by Ellen Grace
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