In any grading of high-school movies, Fast Times At Ridgemont High would earn a distinction. That 1982 comedy comes packed with charismatic performances from such ripening-on-the-tree stars-to-be as Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates. Leigh prepared by taking a job at the pizza parlour where her character works; Penn was so Method about playing stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli that he later wrote: “Was I being Jeff or Sean? I felt like there was no Sean. I was immersed.”
That immersion is shared by the book that inspired the film, a non-fiction work of the same name by Cameron Crowe, later to become the writer-director of his own teen gem, Say Anything. Crowe, then 22, went undercover for a year at Clairemont High School, San Diego, to write an anthropological study of the modern teenager. The dense, authentic detail that would later come out in the film is all right there on the page.
What is less well known is that the picture spawned its own spin-off of sorts; a documentary called All American High. Inspired by Fast Times, film-maker Keva Rosenfeld turned his camera on the Class of 1984 at Torrance High, Southern California. His trump card was to use a 17-year-old Finnish exchange student, Rikki Rauhala, as the film’s narrator.
Rauhala’s outlook is as dazzlingly bright as her platinum hair, and her mix of ingenuous joy and wry scepticism puts an analytical slant on this world of proms, cheerleaders and keg parties. She’s no chump, though. She comments perceptively on her classmates’ conformity (“Their opinions come from their parents”), and her innocence and candour enables the film to be subtly critical of its subjects without stooping to condescension.
Thirty years on, Rosenfeld has staged a kind of cinematic school reunion for a follow-up: All American High Revisited. The first half is comprised of footage from the original film, the flicks and feather-cuts, the over-emphatic dance moves. The second part provides an update on some of the old faces: the troublemaker who is now a cop, the former stoner who can’t remember taking part in the original film. This is all pleasant, if a touch lazy: you can’t help feeling that Rosenfeld is striving for the Boyhood effect, the Seven Up! touch, without having put in the requisite donkeywork.
Still, it’s impossible not to be charmed all over again by Rauhala, now married with three children and living happily in Karjaa, Finland. Watching All American High with her kids proves to be an emotional experience. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” she says, then adds wistfully, “I still don’t.” Her teenage daughter, who notes that her mother made friends through “actual contact, not the internet”, tells Rauhala: “You’re not the same any more.” And she’s right. The past is another country. They moonwalk there.
