My Old School: school daze

The story of a 1990s media curio is unspooled in surprisingly conventional, protracted fashion in Jono McLeod’s My Old School. It’s 1993, and a 16-year-old student named Brandon Lee has just enrolled at Bearsden Academy, a secondary school in an affluent, leafy suburb of Glasgow. He soon ingratiates himself into his peer group and ultimately graduates from the school, but his secret is exposed soon after: he is not a teenager at all, but a man in his early 30s, who had in fact attended Bearsden barely 12 years earlier.

Its sensational story aside, the documentary’s primary selling point is the presence of Alan Cumming in the role of the mysterious real-life figure at its heart, who, while unwilling to appear on camera, is happy to speak with his own voice. But having the Scottish national treasure lip-sync Lee’s audio interview recordings ultimately comes across as more of an attention-grabbing gimmick than a necessary formal strategy, a feeling that also extends to the film’s extensive use of animation.

These animated sequences, which show everyday life at school and outside it, alternate with aerial shots of the neighbourhood, recollections from schoolmates and teachers (shown as talking heads in a classroom studio set), snippets of archive footage from the era, and Lee’s own memories as mouthed by Cumming. As the various testimonies (including that of McLeod, who was a pupil at Bearsden alongside Lee) make clear, the new starter was something of an enigma to his coevals, starting from his very name, which seemed, despite Lee’s later protestations, like a reference to another charismatic ’90s figure. Despite his unusual appearance and Canadian accent, which he apparently picked up while his mother was touring as an opera singer there, Lee managed to find his feet surprisingly quickly, taking vulnerable classmates under his wing, impressing teachers with his intelligence and even landing a plum role in a school production of South Pacific.

As the documentary’s eventual revelation of Lee’s actual identity confirms, this all turned out to be far too good to be true. Combined with the leisurely pace of recollection, however, the decision to continually foreshadow this serves to creates more impatience than tension on the part of the viewer – a lingering desire for the film to finally get to the point. While the sheer profusion of details is part of the film’s strategy, as each one progressively takes on a different significance once Lee’s secret is revealed, there is a sense that the film is just as interested in simply spending ample time in this already much-mined era than it is in telling its story.

This wouldn’t be a problem if other, less predictable ways of representing the era and the story set within it were also on display, but McLeod sticks throughout to the same mix of talking heads, archive footage and animation – this last perkily literal at best, content to function as simple, unedifying illustration of the many anecdotes told rather than offering a counterpoint to them or pushing them in stranger directions. The animation ends up feeling like so much window dressing – somewhat at odds with its subject, who had the imaginative nous to concoct an entire false life for himself. The background music is hardly a help either, telling the viewer what to feel rather than allowing any ambivalence to percolate.

Given the subject matter, a greater degree of ambivalence might have been appropriate, as the story of Lee’s deception and the media’s subsequent obsessive fascination with it point to a whole series of wider, often troubling questions about childhood, identity, opportunity, trust and responsibility. Yet here, too, McLeod coasts along on the surface instead of burrowing deeper into these themes or trying to find less obvious images for them. Perhaps his personal attachment to the material, given that he was at school with Lee in 1993, is more a hindrance than a help when it comes to stepping back from the specifics of the story to get at its knottier core.

With a wealth of other films from Waltz with Bashir (2008) to The Wolf House (2018) to Flee (2021) having tapped into animation’s ability to represent the unrepresentable, it’s easy to imagine how it could be used to show the inside of Lee’s troubled psyche or the emotional states of those he hoodwinked. By comparison, landing Alan Cumming as a lip-syncer might be impressive, but it doesn’t give you a great deal to look at.

► My Old School is in UK cinemas now.