Rob Grant’s This Too Shall Pass opens with Simon Benson (Maxwell Jackson) sitting, stern and bloody-faced, in the back of a police car – and explaining to Officer Harris (Chris Sandiford) how a kid from Syracuse, New York came to be under arrest in Ottawa, Canada without his parents, all to the synth pop accompaniment of Alphaville’s Forever Young (1984) on the soundtrack. It is the fag end of the Eighties, and Simon is not going to be forever young. In fact, at 16 years old, he is on the cusp of adulthood, and the last three days that have led him to be here have been his rough rites of passage.
“Whoa, wait wait wait, are you trying to narrate right now?”, Harris asks Simon, “it’s cliched, first of all, and second, I don’t think you have the voice for it.” This is crucial to the way that Michael Simon Baker and Grant’s screenplay operates. It may bring post-modern irony to its chosen tropes, expressly flagging them up for their conventionality – but that does not stop it using them. Of course Simon will go on to narrate his story, which we will also see unfolding in flashback, even as Harris listens and considers what to do with this earnest, confused young man.
Similarly, when Simon and a group of his teenaged friends – conflicted goth Tim (Ben Cockell), over-indulging Chris (Jeremy Ray Taylor), sex-obsessed John (Aidan Laprete) and sweetly sincere cinephile James (Jaylin Webb) – cross borders and break rules on a one-time adventure together, they explicitly compare their experiences to what happens in Eighties teen flicks like John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything… (1989), even self-consciously recreating scenes from those films. Yet they also comment on the lack of realism, let alone of black characters like James, in the Hughes œuvre. Meanwhile, in Simon Benson’s three days off, Katie Douglas, who plays (one of) Simon’s love interest(s) Misty, appears in part to have been cast for her passing resemblance to Bueller’s Mia Sara.
Indeed, much of This Too Shall Pass is concerned with the play of (film) fantasy and reality, dream and disillusionment, which is to say, the mismatch between what these boys desire, and what the world has to offer them. Simon’s own transitional status is marked by the prominent grey forelock on his otherwise blonde hair. This is a result of poliosis, a genetic condition reducing the melanin in his follicles – but it also makes Simon look all at once young and old, as he contemplates his grown-up future and realises that not everything will “magically turn out” the way it does in the movies. Yet, paradoxically, he and his friends all are in a teen movie, so that in the end there may well be something of a “‘Dare to be great’ moment” and a happy ending (although in fact the film’s final image falls somewhere in between, more nuanced and ambivalent than straightforwardly triumphant).
With news in the background tracking movement at the Berlin Wall and a possible thaw in bellicose relations between East and West, Simon has been fighting his own Cold War at home. His parents (Robert Longstreet, Alana Hawley Purvis) and brother (David Feehan) are devout Mormons and draconian to boot, draining every last bit of adolescent fun from his life, so naturally he rebels, secretly smoking, drinking and partying with his friends when he should be at sports meets, and eventually stealing his dad’s church money and heading with his friends to Canada in quixotic pursuit of a girl (Nikki Roumel) he has only just met.
The very desperation and criminality of this act guarantee it will be Simon’s last stand before he is ‘done’ and likely grounded for the rest of his teen years, which in effect he has been for the previous ones – and so Simon is determined to bust out completely, if briefly, and to make this excursion worth it, even if the path to his improbable goal will be paved with muggings, dingy motels, bar fights, endless dumb-assed scams and ultimately, arrest. This is a transgressive journey of discovery, where boundaries are tested, sexualities are explored, hearts are broken – all along the bittersweet road to adolescent self-realisation.
Meanwhile a different kind of Cold War – between the United States and Canada – is constantly being waged, as these young Americans run afoul of their various Canuck hosts, not all of whom are as friendly as their reputation would have it. The result is a charming cross-cultural, coming-of-age comedy, as these five visitors and their new local friends Misty, Helen (Saylor Mc Pherson), Sophie (Jade V. Robinson) and Sophie’s older brother Eric (Dylan Floyde) sort through their messy present and rapidly approaching future, and seek from us, as Simon does from Officer Harris, a modicum of sympathy for their growing pains.
strap: In Rob Grant’s bittersweet Eighties-set coming-of-age flick, a Mormon teen crosses the Canadian and other borders for a last hurrah
© Anton Bitel
