Posted Oct 1, 2022, 8:30 AM
Documentaries also sometimes tell extraordinary stories.
This takes place in 1993. In the high school of a beautiful district of Glasgow, a new kid arrives. Brandon Lee is 16 years old. He comes from Canada but he spent his youth traveling the world alongside his opera singer mother. Over the months and weeks, he integrates into his new class, makes friends and establishes himself as one of the brightest students in high school.
Schizophrenic dubbing
Brandon Lee never existed. Under the uniform hid a certain Brian McKinnon. At thirty, frustrated at having failed his entrance exam to medical school, he had decided to become a high school student again to try his luck again under a new identity.
Director Jono McLeod, former classmate of “Brandon Lee”, dissects the mechanisms of this magnificent imposture. How could an entire high school, from the management to the students, have been so easily fooled? An illusion all the more extraordinary in that McKinnon had precisely returned to his old establishment, whose director had not changed.
Jono McLeod reunites with old friends trying to remember that strange year. A past reconstructed in the original form of a cartoon.
Brian McKinnon still lives in Glasgow. He agreed to speak with the filmmaker but did not wish to be filmed. His voice was therefore put on the face of comedian Alan Cumming in a schizophrenic dubbing exercise. “My Old School” only becomes more singular in its way of twisting reality: after all isn’t McKinnon himself a two-faced actor?
younger than spring
“My Old School” also weaves a work on memory. No one remembers exactly what happened. How did Brian McKinnon land the lead role in the year-end show? In the musical “South Pacific”, he sings at the top of his lungs that he feels “younger than spring”. His partner on stage remembers a very chaste little kiss. The old VHS does not deceive: on the screen, the fake teenager languidly kisses the real high school girl.
Many gray areas remain: what really happened during a trip with high school friends to Spain? What did McKinnon’s mother know, whom he passed off as his grandmother to his friends?
Back to the future
“My old school” deals with the subject in a light, sometimes almost nostalgic way. To his former comrades, this Brandon sometimes leaves good memories. The film often turns out to be very funny and no one seems really angry with the impostor. After all, his adventure reveals the injustice of a school system that does not give everyone the second chance they deserve.
Moreover, Brian McKinnon will only have heightened the fantasy of so many fictions, from “Peggy Sue got married” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1986) to “Camille redoubles” (Noémie Lvovsky, 2012) via ” Back to the future” (Robert Zemeckis, 1985): experiencing a second adolescence.
Under the name of Brandon Lee, Brian McKinnon will eventually pass his medical exam… before being expelled from college. But perhaps he was looking in his madness for an answer to this larger and haunting question for any adult: what if we had to do it again?
