Before I Change My Mind: A Non-Binary 80s High School Musical

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

A new middle-school student arrives late to a sex-ed class in 1987 Alberta. Girls are on one side of the room, boys on the other. The kid, with short dark hair, delicate features and named Robin, sits in the middle.

Later, school bully Carter (Dominic Lippa) confronts Robin with the question, “What are you?” To which one might add, what exactly is Before I Change My Mind?

In an amusing essay last year for the CBC website, director Trevor Anderson describes how he came up with the idea for Before I Change My Mind, his first feature after 15 years of making short films. As Anderson tells it, the Telefilm funding gatekeepers did not respond warmly to his first idea “about an alien in human form [that] begins to stalk Edmonton, consuming men with its monstrous penis!”

Taking the safer route, he opted to write for a “semi-autobiographical coming-of-age” drama set in the eighties, which he did half-heartedly until a friend and eventual co-writer, Fish Griwkowsky, came up with the idea of not disclosing the gender of the main character, played by the Canadian non-binary teen actor, Vaughan Murrae.

It’s an intriguing premise, which compels the viewer to continually check expectations about the character’s behaviour. We do know that Robin is regarded as an outsider by their classmates, enough to arouse the violence of the mean girls set, though which washroom they use is unknown.

There’s a lot going on in Before I Change My Mind and most of it works. The film breaks into three acts, sensitively performed by its young cast, and painstaking in its recreation of retro clothing and production values, shot around Red Deer, Alberta, valiantly stretching a shoestring budget.

The amiable first act involves Robin’s friendship, or possible mutual crush with Carter, who shares Robin’s music class, where the only instruments are saxophones. The two become close after a school field trip to the legendary West Edmonton Mall, involving midway rides and a musical performance in mid-ice in the mall’s arena. Stuck at a motel for the day as a penalty for missing the bus, Robin and Carter manage to get an indigent person (Joshua Carter), who is dressed as pop star Madonna, to buy them beer.

Later that night, at an impromptu motel room co-ed party involving drinking and teasing, Carter turns cruel to the class scapegoat, a Filipino-Canadian kid named Tony (Jhztyn Contado) who works in the local Chinese restaurant, a sadistic streak that grows more pronounced through the film.

A second section involves a community theatre production, overseen by a fussy, pompous director-writer (played by director Anderson) with his knockoff production called Jesus Christ: Video Star, featuring an adult Jesus and an adolescent Mary Magdalene, performed by a gifted young singer in giant glasses named Izzy (Lacey Oake). The mock musical, in the mode of Waiting for Guffman, is good fun, with composer Lyle Bell demonstrating an ear for the candied synth drums and keyboards of mid-eighties pop music.

Less convincing are the film’s second half turn to drama, with echoes of a John Hughes teen drama of the era, involving troubled parents, crushes, first love and heartache. The adults in the film tend to the cartoonish, including Kristin Johnston as a fiercely peppy music teacher, Anne (Shannon Blanchet) as a man-hungry drunk, and Matthew Rankin as Dan, Robin’s repressed, well-meaning single dad.

Meanwhile, the kids are busy fumbling from innocence to experience, on an emotional if not a physical level. The cocky Carter is attracted to Izzy, but Izzy likes the gentler Robin. Robin is attracted to Carter and likes Izzy back, but not in that way.

The way the script avoids gendered pronouns is ingenious, but it also limits our understanding of the characters’ behaviours. Whether Carter or Izzy believe Robin is a boy or girl is unknown, so it’s not possible to call these relationships either hetero or homoerotic, or whether these questions are troubling to the kids involved.

Somehow all this jealous tension drives one of three kids over the edge in the film’s final head-scratcher of a melodramatic twist. It’s an ending that feels imported from a different kind of teen movie, less Pretty in Pink and more East of Eden.

It’s a forgivable fault for a first feature such as Before I Change My Mind to try to do too much, especially at a time when gender issues have become so politically contentious. The film can plausibly be understood as a protest against the kind of new more restrictive youth gender laws introduced in several jurisdictions, including Alberta earlier this year.

Before I Change My Mind. Directed by Trevor Anderson. Written by Trevor Anderson and Fish Griwkowsky. Starring Vaughn Murrae, Dominic Lippa, Lacey Oake, Matthew Rankin, Kirstin Johnston and Shannon Blanchet. In theatres April 19.