Listen to the Elizabethan overtones of the title, then watch "As You Like It" appear in the film for a big part. "Whole New Thing" may not be a whole new approach, or cinematic thing, but it surely is a leisurely, thoughtful, and one hopes thought-provoking take on Shakespeare's "As You Like It".
"As You Like It" is a pastoral comedy. That genre, rather obsolete now, works more like romance for us. Set in a snow-bleached Nova Scotia, the film seems to say pastoral with winter written allover. But that is not as grim as it sounds, one has just to see the juxtapositions with and the transpositions from the play, and will get what the film gives and is about. For reviewers complain, or note -without actual elaboration- on the touchiness of the subject or praise pointing to things that were weird or off-putting, not quite paying attention to the film's tone. This tone makes the affirmation that the theme is the teacher-pupil sexual relation dubious, if not plainly irrelevant.
It begins with 13-year-old Emerson completing his huge manuscript of a novel and as it seems, with drawings all his own. Some seconds before in the sequence, we see a William Blake drawing hanging above. This sets the tone for what will follow. A quite young person with such capacities, this means we are already in the woods of Arden. Rather cunningly, it also suggests, as it gloriously happens with Shakespeare's Rosalind, that young Em, being a writer at that age, must be some kind of master of perspectives.
And he is. It is just, and this is where the film's take on "As You Like It" begins to take off, that his parents are so much free-spirited hippies urging him to "talk", "be natural about discovering his burgeoning sexuality" (it seems for them it is little more than a matter of masturbation), that so much solicited liberty becomes problematic. And comical and entertaining for us, as young Em facing them, feels the strain but doesn't lose his wit.
The parents are not peripheral to the story. Rog, the father, a self-absorbed scientist played with a hint of caricature by Robert Joy, recalls "the melancholy Jacques" from "As You Like It". Only here, instead of him being introduced to us as someone weeping over a deer, we have an idealist trying to convert human excrement to utilitarian, "fueling" purposes. That is good, but, well, when his wife starts en extramarital affair, he becomes an impotent, raging man, with the face of a religious fanatic. We are far away from the "jerk off" dialogue in the beginning.
Kaya, the mother, is a sexy, assertive, and a bit disoriented woman, who, after having sex with Denny for the first time, cannot help herself but be as garrulous as she reports her husband to be. And all that positive stance from both parents, does not amount to much when they embark on the anxiety ride after they think they find out and about their son's sexuality. Well, a parent is just a comic parent, after all.
And a teacher is a frustrated teacher. Don Grant, the teacher, never takes advantage of the boy. Actually, he is not at all interested. Emerson is a catalyst for him. What for? Watch the scene that comes after Em's acting out/declaration of love. What triggers Don's unease is not Em being a minor, being a pupil, being mature enough to discard gay and straight labels, but what he says in the end: it is not about having sex, he says, he just wants to feel close. That is what bothers Don. Daniel McIvor plays this finely hinting that where Don failed is exactly this: he was afraid of being close to his ex, Claude, as an earlier meeting between the two shows. And that is what he wants to restore, as it is elliptically conveyed to us. He calls Claude, then sets of to see him, then strangely stops at the public toilets for a quickie, as is his custom. And then we realize that this habit, reported to us before, is not due to protecting oneself from the public eye in a small town, but an obsessive pattern that refuses the reaffirmation of intimate moments.
And what is the whole new thing that bothers Emerson? In the spirit of the film, it is as if it is not so much the discovery of sexuality, for we do not know if we can actually term infatuation his feelings towards his teacher. Saying that he wants to feel close, marks more as a feeling of loneliness and seclusion with his parents way too long (watch the first shot in the sauna, with its nonchalant nakedness and hot pressures). What Em discovers is innocence. As in "As You Like It", sex is sewn with innocence. The story of each character, with its shifting accent on sexuality and its roles, gender and its assumptions, is tender-hearted, tenderly and poignantly handled, recalling the shifting perspectives in Shakespeare's play. Rosalind may command perspectives throughout, but young Em at the end is exhausted. The Arcadian forest of Arden cannot be for long an Arcadian family, nor a Utopian relationship between teacher and pupil.
The ending is not as abrupt as it seems. All couples are restored: Claude and Don, Rog and Kaya, and seemingly Emerson and his dreamworld. As his father says, we do not know what Em is dreaming of, he would not dare begin to think what he is dreaming of, thus letting it be; as the poet says, "the years shone back on yours/free and immune from mine". In a way love as sexual innocence, and in sexuality, not pre-sexual, is restored. It may not be, as the last phrase lingers after the film ends, a whole new thing, but isn't that something?
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