SMELL OF US, The

Larry Clark, provocateur king of American cinema, returns with his most scabrous film to date.

Ever since Kids explosively upended our ideas of what could and couldn't be depicted on a movie screen, Larry Clark (Wassup Rockers, MIFF 2006) has delighted in shining his unflinching cinematic light into the darkest, dankest, most discomfiting corners of teenage culture. In The Smell of Us, Clark leaves behind the suburbs of America for the streets of Paris, discovering that teen alienation works the same no matter where you are – with absurd, brutal and always explicit consequences.

The Smell of Us follows the charismatic, beautiful Math as he and a cadre of disaffected middle-class French youth skate, smoke and screw their days away. Desperate to feel something, the crew decide to start working as rent boys for rich older men, setting the scene for a voyeuristic whirlwind of sex, drugs, depravity and armpit-sniffing that only Larry Clark could possibly contrive.