Massacre Menace

Michelle has tight corkscrews of mousy hair scraped back from a brow dusted with acne. Her features might mature into being handsome - but we'll never know. She's at the puppy fat stage of girlhood and morbidly self-conscious. She can't bear to wear shorts for phys-ed.

Yet the first time we see Michelle she is truly beautiful, moving in fluid slow motion across the playing field, her eyes open to the wonder of the sky. The last time we see her it's in the school library, her blood and brains spattering the spines of reference books, gunned down by a sociopathic fellow pupil.

The trajectory Michelle follows in Elephant describes the compass of director Gus Van Sant's peculiarly intense empathy with adolescents. The director can evoke their uncertainty, their intellectual hunger, their sensuality and their shame better than any other film-maker.

He is no Larry Clark getting kinky kicks out of teeny voyeurism, but a visual poet determined to capture the wonder of humanity in its larval, inchoate stage. That young lives should be pulped before - so to speak - they're published, is what gives films like My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy their sense of tragic yearning.

There are two Van Sants though: the backwoods auteur of the Pacific North West, and the sharper-edged satirist, who has made films such as To Die For and Good Will Hunting. Films that, while they possess a slightly quirky vision, have few traces of the lyricism that can lift his work far beyond the ordinary. In Elephant, Van Sant returns to his roots: shot in Portland, Oregon, he has mostly eschewed the use of professional actors - let alone starry Kidmans and Douglases - in favour of inspired amateurs improvising their lines. Still, he is a director who always tarnishes stars, just as he can't help putting the shine on the earthy people. These high-school students, teachers and auxiliary workers acquire a strange lustre as they walk down corridors and traverse the autumnal campus.

In part, this has to be because we know what's going to happen to them. Even if you've missed the pre-publicity for the film and have drifted into the cinema in total ignorance, in this day and age a beautifully shot day-in-the-life of an American high school cannot help but be charged with the minatory, just as the sight of an adult fondling a child forces us to think of sexual abuse.

The high-school massacres that have excoriated the American psyche in the past two decades, have also produced their own cultural by-product, from the agitprop of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, to the more measured tones of Douglas Coupland's novel Hey Nostradamus!. But even if we don't automatically make the equation between school and slaughterhouse, Van Sant's narrative loops back on itself, so that the moment when the two nerdish killers stride in, tooled up in their combat gear, and ready to wreak their revenge, comes early on, and is then revisited again and again from the perspectives of the other characters.

Elias the photographer; John, who's struggling with his alcoholic father; the top jock Nathan and his homecoming queen Carrie; the junior Valley Girls, Brittany, Jordan and Nicole; and, of course, the killers themselves, bullied Alex and gawky Eric. We walk by their shoulders, we hear their breathing, we see what they see, we feel the peculiar torsion as the dreadful possibility is twisted into reality, so that when the shootings actually begin they are infested with beautiful languor.

Shot on 35mm, and in the narrower 1:33 ratio that was the industry standard in the 1950s, Harris Savides's cinematography is at once vivid and elegiac. These kids float into death, their forms first vivid and then exiguous. Van Sant and Savides may feel that the narrower format is better suited to the subject matter, but in part it echoes the Alan Clark television film of the same name which was the inspiration for this Elephant.

Clark, a director of genius, made his Elephant as a response to the sectarian murders of Northern Ireland. Grainy and brutalistic, the 1987 film features killing after killing, the perpetrators anonymous, the settings starkly quotidian, the dialogue nonexistent. The cumulative effect of these assassinations is to make the viewer feel numb, trampled by the raging bull of human aggression. In a sense Van Sant has rung the changes on this idea: the settings are beautified, his perpetrators and their victims are given characters, while their overheard dialogue has the odd lustre of an objet trouvè. Nevertheless, the enraged elephant remains the same.