Dazed and Confused

Richard Linklater, USA, 1993, 94 minutes

A smash hit at last year's Edinburgh Film Festival and originally scheduled for a straight-to-video release, Richard Linklater's second feature is a superbly enjoyable piece of cinema entertainment. In accordance with the 1990s obsession with the seventies Dazed and Confused follows the events of the last day of high school for a group of 1976 middle-American teenagers as they ritually humiliate next year's new kids, party their butts off, and try to get hold of those all-important Aerosmith concert tickets.

Linklater's feat is not simply to generate a fantastically observed picture of teenage experience and behaviour but also to get such uniformly brilliant performances from his ensemble cast of unknown young talent It's rare to see such a large cast work so well together; the sense of unity conveyed in the story seems to have been equally present in the group of actors during shooting. It's possibly this factor as well as the good-natured (but not sentimental) humour that makes Dazed and Confused a real feel-good movie.

Linklater has made a film that values the innocence of previous teenage eras but vaguely anticipates the loss of that innocence as adult life and decisions about the future loom on the horizon (as do the heroin/AIDS 80s). It is utterly impossible not to enjoy this film.

Review by Iain Harral
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96