Premiere Magazine
Busy Man On Campus: Ian Somerhalder gives Faye Dunaway the old college try.
Beyond Animal House
It's fall again, and the students of New England's Camden College are back on campus, getting on with the rituals of the mysterious march to adulthood: prodigious drinking, cocaine-snorting, straight sex, gay sex, vomiting, pills, gang bangs, date rape, amoral professors, clueless parents, and presumably, classes. Sigh...doesn't it make you nostalgic?
Welcome to higher education as filtered though the minds of director Roger Avary (Killing Zoe, the Oscar-winning cowriter of Pulp Fiction) and author Bret Easton Ellis, whose 1987 novel lends its story, name and decadence to The Rules of Attraction. "We're talking sex and drugs," Avary says. "And love - possibly the most dangerous thing there is." In making this low-budget, nonlinear foray into the uglier side of youth angst, Avary looked to Jean Renoir's controversial 1939 social drama, Rules of the Game. "Nihilism - and Easton Ellis nihilism - is always attributed to the '80s," Avary says, "[but] I don't really consider it exclusive to the '80s. Rules of the Game was set between the wars, when there was a great amount of luxurious debauchery and moral decadence, and the bourgeois ruling class was depicted in that film in a way that they had never been depicted before - realistically."
In this modern context, an elite student body receives a thorough examination. Dawson's Creek softie James Van Der Beek does an audacious 180 as the film's reckless lothario Sean Bateman - the younger brother of Ellis's infamous American Psycho protagonist, Patrick Bateman. "He's very predatory," Van Der Beek says of his character, "and he's almost animalistic in his instincts." Those careening in and out of Sean's orbit are a fictionalized version of Easton Ellis's classmates at Bennington College: a rich sexual libertine named Paul (Life as a House's Ian Somerhalder), Paul's confused ex-girlfriend (A Knight's Tale's Shannyn Sossamon), her lustful roommate (7th Heaven's Jessica Biel), and a local drug dealer (Traffic's Clifton Collins Jr.).
The eclectic cast - which also features Kate Bosworth, Kip Pardue, Faye Dunaway, and Eric Stoltz - has enjoyed the chance to expose the pierced underbelly of undergraduate life at this fictitious college (re-created in southern California), which includes, among other things, a "Dress to Get Screwed Party." Sossamon endured the indignities of simulated rape and being repeatedly thrown up on. And Van Der Beek has been having "an absolute blast" playing the bad boy, though fans of his heart-on-his-sleeve TV alter ego "might have a little trouble watching Dawson's Creek after this," he laughs. "They are always going to be wondering in the back of their minds if Dawson's really just a little bit psycho."
According to the creators, the social satire should prove to be, at the very least, provocative. "I don't consider this film to be just exemplary, but epochal, monumental!" Avary bellows. "It's vulgar, it's violent, it's funny," Collins chimes in. "It's raw and it's real," Somerhalder adds with fervor. "It's the end of the teen genre."
-Jay A. Fernandez
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