“Brandon,” it emerges, was not Brandon in any respect, however as an alternative Brian MacKinnon, who was 32 when he re-enrolled at Bearsden posing as a 17-year-old pupil. Although he’d studied on the similar college within the late Nineteen Seventies, not one of the educating employees acknowledged MacKinnon, who’d permed his hair as a part of his disguise. The imposter’s rationalization to the headmaster that he’d not too long ago relocated to the world, in the meantime, was accepted with out additional scrutiny after a fast deal with examine.
The astonishing particulars of MacKinnon’s ruse—not revealed till 1995, a yr after he’d aced his higher-grade exams and begun finding out drugs at Dundee College—made him notorious in Scotland, and the case has understandably caught with those that solely thought they knew him. One such peer, McLeod stays largely off-camera all through “My Previous Faculty,” which interviews over 30 of his former schoolmates and lecturers in a rueful however good-humored try to determine how all of them may have been taken in by such a ridiculous deception.
Consequently, “My Previous Faculty” usually feels as warmly provincial as a category reunion, although the movie’s evaluation of what occurred is stymied by its members’ lingering combination of bemusement and chagrin. “Bearsden Academy was a little bit of a time warp,” presents one pupil, Nicola Walker, not fairly protecting the grin off her face. “I bear in mind it being very old school,” provides one other, recognized as Valerie.
McLeod himself usually appears content material to have fun about the entire affair. The animation is particularly rife with gags, resembling one through which the younger/outdated MacKinnon heads to class and is confronted with instructions posted on the finish of a hallway: one factors to Historical past, the opposite Trendy Research. Additionally amusing however unrevealing is McLeod’s determination to seat his interviewees at college desks, cramped postures and bewildered expressions underlining that central query of how MacKinnon was in a position to pull off such a discomfiting masquerade, and why.
“It was like being behind enemy strains with out an enemy,” MacKinnon recounts boastfully at one level, an statement “My Previous Faculty” doesn’t initially pry at a lot as amplify, fixating on this interloper’s mesmeric charms till he seems extra delusion than man. At first, McLeod’s playful, even nostalgic method squares with the feelings of his interviewees, who recall MacKinnon as each an odd duck however a folks hero. However the movie grows darker as McLeod friends into schoolmates’ reminiscences, surfacing half-forgotten incidents and unanswered questions. Sequences through which he factors out inconsistencies of their recollections—or proves, utilizing video footage, that the fact of MacKinnon’s actions was worse than they’d remembered—mark the movie at its most annoying and efficient.