Smack smacks of reality by Cameron Bailey

NOW Magazine Mar 2, 2000 

Smack (Steve Sanguedolce, 2000) takes Sanguedolce deeper into the tricks of biography, and further into risky terrain.  For years one of the country’s most daring diary filmmakers, he ventures to smear the lines this time between real stories and made ones.  Smack takes too-true stories of drugs , petty crime and generally wasted youth, and weaves them together into a story of three brothers.  That’s the soundtrack.  The images are another story.  Smack marries its narration to a welter of scratched and hand-processed images.  Tint and texture race all over the surface of the film, sometimes turning the most mundane pictures -- kids playing, a child in water, a guy prepping drugs - into non-stop, abstract canvases.  This is an action movie of line and colour, with a homegrown Scarface plot burbling underneath.  At times the match between image and narration is too direct for the film’s open style, but then there’s always another bit of beauty coming.