Wild Tigers I Have Known

‘There’s a lion on the campus,’ a woman’s voice drowsily intones over a junior high school’s PA system. ‘Please find a safe place.’ Cam Archer’s lyrical, dreamlike and occasionally surreal coming-of-age tale – exec produced by Gus Van Sant – takes us inside the wandering mind of 13-year-old Logan (Malcolm Stumpf), a smart, sensitive kid with few friends and a crush on slightly older outsider Rodeo (Patrick White). The film isn’t without narrative or even conventional high school-movie elements, and it builds to a sort of awkward anti-climax, but it’s not really a dramatic work; instead, it makes its substantial impact as an impressionistic exercise in the description of Logan’s fluid, questing identity. Its surfaces range from big cathode ray close-ups to stylised tableaux, sun-dappled pastoral reveries to adolescent wank fantasy; its images from a bloodied nose in a cracked mirror to the nocturnal toilet-papering of a majestic tree to the application of lipstick because it photographs well.