The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Quite possibly the most extravagant, unapologetic example of protracted adolescence ever committed to celluloid, a brilliantly guilty pleasure … [A film of] lustrous, rippling superficiality.”

Dennis Cooper, Artforum

Filled with TV stunt casting and a gorgeous, haunted soundtrack (the Slowdive-scored opening credits are an all-timer), Nowhere is an ambitious, polyphonic, and seemingly out-of-control post-Altman network narrative. It’s also Gregg Araki’s most complete charting of the Dantean world of pop culture, jump-cutting through the rhythms of daily life, violently tossing his guileless models into toxic danger, and exposing, via the extended spaces of bedrooms and bathrooms, the private iconography of over a dozen teens and their hopeless hearts. This final chamber of his ​“Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy, censored by its original distributor and never released on DVD in North America, sees Araki sacrificing, like any true disciple of John Waters, all the discomfort, fear, religious fervour, and bad taste boiling around Araki’s rise as a gay artist on the altar of independent cinema. It’s a bit cathartic and, in its new restoration, more beautiful than ever.

Advisory: Nowhere contains a scene of sexual violence.

“Stylized to the max [by] production designer Patti Podesta … Araki is a marvel at controlling shifting tones, and Nowhere, a confident, intricate work, has a great Pop Art look, yet its emotions are real.”

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

“Taking the heterosexual mating games of the high-school movie, Araki twists them into a transgressive cartoon of polymorphous perversity … A self-reflexive assault on mainstream cinema.”

Liese Spencer, Sight and Sound