Saturday, June 17, 3:30 pm, Roxie + streaming encore
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| Before I Change My Mind |
In 1987, Robin (Vaughan Murrae, pictured) has just moved with their single father from Spokane to a small town in Alberta, Canada. On their first day in a new school, they walk into the Sex Education class, with the boys sitting on one side of the gym and the girls on the other side; they walk through and sit exactly on the center line. The other kids aren’t sure what to make of them, but gradually Robin connects with a couple of their classmates, though not always in a healthy way. We follow them and their father as they try to find their niche in a new place.
Before I Change My Mind is remarkable on multiple counts. First of all, filmmaker Trevor Anderson has had several shorts at Frameline (Rock Pockets, Frameline31 “Best Mates”; The Man That Got Away, Frameline37 “Something Real”; Docking, Frameline43 “Animation Shorts”; plus The Little Deputy, 2015, Frameline39, “Fun in Boys Shorts”) — but this is their first feature length film. The shorts were all pretty good, but this feature is excellent, befitting a far more experienced filmmaker. But more than that, Before I Change My Mind is a confident entry in the relatively sparse category of non-binary coming-of-age films. We’ve seen coming-of-age films with main characters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and even intersex, but very few non-binary coming-of-age films. I won’t spoil the plot, but I can tell you that we get to the end of the story without knowing for sure whether Robin was assigned male or female at birth, or whether their gender identity leans at all to one polarity or the other. At times, Robin comes across as a gay boy, a straight boy, a straight girl, and even a lesbian.
Like their classmates in the film, I found myself initially trying to figure out how to pigeonhole them, but I made a conscious decision to let go of that speculation and go with the ambiguity, and I recommend that you, the viewer, do the same. After all, the one thing we can say for certain is that Robin is not a pigeon. Again, no spoilers, but there’s a plot twist at the very end that puts the matter in an unexpected new light.
I definitely put this film into the MUST SEE category, and will be keeping an eye out for future works from this virtuoso filmmaker.
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