Avis des critiques

We're predisposed to love some films because they speak to our sensibilities—they wear our hearts (or our discontents) on their sleeves. Others catch us unawares in a whirlwind of surprise and glee. Clear-cut yet fabulously mutable, Ghost World did both things, fulfilling many high hopes and expectations while at least half its pleasure lies in the craggy, melancholy detours Terry Zwigoff takes getting us there—adding unexpected twists to already twisted material.

The Clowes collaborations are consistent in tone but uneven in quality; Ghost World—a post-high-school coming-of-age tale based on Clowes's graphic novel of the same title, featuring two female misfits growing apart in an unnamed, Sacramento-like city—is the far more effective and affecting movie.

Mark Asch once wrote phenomenally about Hou Hsiao-hsien's work that, "These are movies to live your whole life with." The same could be said about Ghost World, which offers not so much narrative as it does a portrait of a shared moment of lostness, the kind of which many (perhaps all of us) pass through and to which memory often returns.

Teen movies tend to use the emotional turbulence of adolescence to indulge in melodrama, scatology or sentimentality... Ghost World's freshness comes from its refusal to go any of these three ways. Zwigoff and Clowes propose instead is a radically de-romanticised ambience of world-weariness against which the usually evoked forces of hormonal excess and delinquency pale and fade impotently into a list of dull, conformist attitudes which Enid, much like the film itself, rejects as empty clichés.

Like few films since Zwigoff's superb 1995 documentary Crumb, Ghost World sees an underlying poignancy in the lives of outcasts who combat their misery through withering sarcasm and creative misanthropy... Most of Ghost World is funny, but the laughs are inextricably tied to the painful alienation and self-loathing that comes with living on society's fringes.

The film adeptly evokes the unbearable dullness of being 18, the precarious power play of female friendship, the torpor born from having to decide what 'other plans' you should make if you're not going to go to college. Considering it was written by a couple of middle-aged guys (Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff), the film's twang of authenticity is even more impressive.

Birch, who began acting as a toddler and was in some respects the most interesting actor in American Beauty, holds most of the movie together through the sheer force of her blocky personality, though Buscemi, in the best performance of his that I've seen, gives her a run for her money. What emerges is a pretty convincing portrait of what it means to be alive and trying to get by in America at the moment.

I'm sorry, guys–I found Enid smug, complacent, cruel, deceitful, thoughtless, malicious and disloyal. Worst of all, she's rarely funny and never charming, even when she joins her more conventional blond chum Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) in jeering a former drug-addicted classmate making her gushy valedictory speech from a wheelchair.

The most incisive and entertaining depiction of American adolescence since Heathers upended the genre more than a decade ago... My fear is that it'll appeal more to adults than to kids, and wind up in the same box-office scrap heap previously occupied by such intelligent, unconventional teen movies as Rushmore and Election. But those who do see it will be haunted by its memory for years to come.

If Zwigoff doesn't always make his movie move (he's overly faithful to the concept of the cartoon panel), he has a gift for connecting us to people who aren't obviously likable, then making us see the urgency of that connection. When Enid lies in her bedroom listening to the blues, putting down the needle on "Devil Got My Woman" again and again and floating into the ether, it's a measure of this film's gentle power that we don't want to leave her room either.

Because the relatively low-budget teen comedy is one of Hollywood's few viable genres, it has permitted some of the best commercial movies of the past few years, including Rushmore, Election, and Dick. Anything but insubstantial, Ghost World belongs with these—it's smart enough to recognize that, as fleeting as adolescence may be, the world is haunted by the post-adolescent walking wounded. There's an admirable absence of closure.

Terry Zwigoff successfully transitions Ghost World from graphic novel to film, maintaining Daniel Clowes's singular obsession with small-town adolescent loneliness and the fear associated with adult responsibility... Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.