Saturday's Children

Saturday Morning is a documentary, scarcely 90 minutes long, that depicts an encounter session involving a group of California teenagers. It is so deeply felt and subtly crafted that it imparts, despite the short running time, a sense of participation in the group experiment. But all this says nothing of the film's human impact: its unrelenting urgency in conveying the depths of the emotional problems that brought the teen agers together. Saturday Morning is, in short, a rare cinematic record of sorrow and discovery.

Producer-Director Kent Mackenzie spent a year interviewing the kids, then finally brought them together for a six-day session under the guidance of two doctors. The chosen youths come from every background, ghetto to suburbia, and from every kind of home. But as the session progresses, it becomes ap parent that they are bound together by a common sense of loss and uncertainty.

They act out the roles of their parents and worry aloud about sex; they spar with each other, alternately reassuring and shattering the fragile defenses their comrades have constructed.

Then, finally, on the sixth day -- Sat urday morning -- a few of them start to break down. Two of the girls begin weep ng, confessing they have no real knowledge of their own identity. A boy blurts out an intense analysis of his own re lationship with his parents that leaves him sobbing "I've never . . . never been able to love anybody before."

The group shares his insight, but some will not or cannot benefit by it. A black girl, defiantly defensive, insists in a tantrum that she once tried to get close to her father, failed, and now will just go on "kissing his ass." The film ends with a shot of her head resting on the shoulder of a companion, face turned away from the rest of the group.

Saturday Morning is more than just a diary of an encounter session. Some times funny, often poignant and even tragic, it is a film that should be seen by parents together with their children. In the deepest sense of the word, this is a family picture.

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