KILLING ZOE (Directed by Roger Avary. Starring Eric Stoltz, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Julie Delpy, Gary Kemp)

The new year starts with a bang. Or at least a bang! bang! bang! – You’re dead! Killing Zoe is the most in-your-face, sadistic, excessive, violent, witty, hip, smart and sheer fuck-off-and-die thriller since, well, Reservoir Dogs. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking it was made by the same person, since the ads represent it misleadingly as a Quentin Tarantino film. What that really means is that the wunderkind of new brutalism helped raise the money for his friend and former video store colleague, first time writer/director Roger Avary.

The Video Archives shop in Manhattan Beach, California probably has more prospective directors applying for positions than most film schools. The fact that two such daring and accomplished young film-makers emerged from behind the same sales counter can hardly be dismissed as coincidence. If the movie brats of the ’70s (Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma) were the first generation of film-school directors, Tarantino and Avary quite plausibly represent the spearhead of a new generation schooled in repeated video viewing, with techniques learned on the freeze frame, a playful attitude to form picked up from liberal use of the rewind button and an affection for the kind of violent trash aesthetics that dominate rental shelves.

Avary, who has received credits for doing a rewrite on True Romance and coming up with the storyline for the central Gold Watch sequence in Pulp Fiction, has undoubtedly been influenced by Tarantino, but his debut feature is shot through with enough individuality and sheer bloody-minded style to survive comparison. Like Dogs, it makes a virtue of its low budget by paring the story down to its most economic and intense, employing cinematic shock tactics but mining a vein of substance through accomplished performances from a superbly assembled cast (why, even Gary Kemp comes out of this with credit, although since he is cast as a self-deluding dick-head the part is hardly a stretch).

Featuring the second recent cinematic character to be named after the last letter of the alphabet (the first, purely coincidentally, appeared in the Gold Watch sequence of Pulp Fiction. Doesn’t Avary know any other letters?), Killing Zoe follows the misadventures of Zed (Eric Stoltz), an American in Paris, an uneasy drifter in danger of losing his very identity in an increasingly alien environment. Mind you, it is an environment even a Parisian could get lost in, a druggy demi-monde of decaying squats and basement Dixie jazz clubs. In fact, apart from some establishing credits footage, the film was shot entirely in LA, with a bilingual cast. If Godard and other New Wave directors hi-jacked the American film noir for their own purposes, Avary seems to be intent on reclaiming it, complete with continental flavourings.

An expert safe-cracker, Zed has been brought in by his old friend Eric (Jean-Hughes Anglade) to assist in a Bastille day bank robbery. Eric’s foolproof plan seems to amount to “We go in, we get what we want, we come out,” but rather than spend the night before in careful preparation, Eric finds himself on a dope, drink, pills and heroin binge. Avary brings considerable visual flair to the proceedings, his blurring use of slo-mo and tight close-ups creating a suitably stoned impression, before the film opens out, with wider shots, harder colours and clinical cutting as it turns into an all out, bloody heist caper.

The story wobbles perilously along a moral tightrope, somewhere between a celebration of the dangerous appeal of unadulterated hedonism and a critique of a generation raised on the NOW principal of Thatcherism and Reaganism taken to an almost cartoon like extreme: live fast, die young and leave a pile of beautiful corpses in your wake. Avary has described it, credibly, as a descent into the mind of the sociopathic Eric, stunningly portrayed by Jean-Hughes Anglade as a wild-card personality so forceful people follow him just because he tells them what they want to hear: everything is going to be fine. Eric Stoltz (fast becoming a kind of young Harvey Keitel, he seems to be in every second art-house movie coming out of the States these days) provides admirably quiet and controlled contrast to the scene stealing Anglade. But Zed is hardly the moral centre: the best that could be said about him is he is passive and indecisive, a follower, not a leader. When Eric arrives on the scene, his first action is to throw Zed’s hooker companion Zoe (Julie Delpy) out of the room naked, to which Zed barely protests. His journey in the film is one in which he has to eventually decide his fate and future for himself.

It is this allegorical and moral dimension that gives Killing Zoe some backbone, suggesting the kind of depths of Reservoir Dogs that were missing from Pulp Fiction. Mind you, it may all have been a highbrow excuse to put together a low-brow killer thriller. This is boy’s own cinema: Hey, let’s take a shit load of drugs and rob a bank. But the result is a riveting mix of quasi-philosophical gibberish, terminal hipness, badass attitude, comic nihilism, gratuitous sadism and casual misogyny. Remind you of anyone?