The Trotsky

Released in 2009, award-winning Canadian film The Trotsky has so many elements of being a typical North American indie high school comedy.

An array of awkward, middle class suburban teenagers  – check. Geeky male protagonist with crush on an older woman – check. Family arguments over the dinner table – check. Constant feuds with authority, usually in the form of the school’s management – check. Hip indie soundtrack – check. Bill Murray – check.

Okay, I did make the last one up, but the similarities with Rushmore, the 1998 Wes Anderson movie, don’t go unnoticed.  But there is a few vital differences. For one, while both film’s eccentric protagonists spend all their times devoted to far-fetched extra-curricular activities, Rushmore’s wants a school aquarium. Our anti-hero in The Trotsky, on the other hand, wants… a union! And nor is his go-to guy an eccentric wealthy industrialist, but in this case, an aging leftie scholar just waiting to rediscover his student activist past.

The reason being, that The Trosky’s central character, slightly neurotic seventeen year old student Leon Bronstein, is convinced that he’s the reincarnation of his namesake, Leon Trotsky – to such an extent that’s he’s mapped his life out accordingly. There’s no doubt that it’s an interesting interpretation of Trotskyism, with Bronstein, played by Canadian actor Jay Baruchel, obsessed with ‘fate’, pretty peculiar in itself for a self-declared dialectical materialist – or as one character puts it ‘for a Marxist you make a great Hindu’. His attitude to women leaves a lot to be desired as well – one of the key plotlines of the film is Bronstein’s attempts to get PhD student Alexandra, which happens to also be the name of Trotsky’s first wife, to fall in love with him. Pretty creepy.

Bronstein’s major obsession is starting unions. So when his factory-owning father takes him in for some work experience and Leon tries to unionise the workforce and calls a ‘hunger strike’, as punishment, his dad takes him out of his exclusive private school and he begins the new term in a state school. Joining the student union, he soon discovers that their entire ‘legislative power’ extends to organising the school dance.

Taking a couple of other students under his wing, he sets about organising a ‘real’ union, predictably coming into conflict with the school principal (who for reasons which are never explained bears a startling resemblance to Lenin), student bureaucrats and the school board. There’s various trials and tribulations along the way as we then see Bronstein organise a strike of the school’s students and step things up as the film reaches its conclusion. As for the school dance, the theme becomes ‘social change’, leading to one of the funniest, most offbeat scenes of the film as groups of Zapatistas, Black Panthers and Maoists march on the school hall.

There’s a few pitfalls in the film – the fact it plays to every negative stereotype of Trotskyists as being a bunch of crazy idealists being one of them. Bronstein is eccentric to the max, not always in a good way, meaning he’s always more of an anti-hero than anything else. But the film does becomes more sympathetic to him and his aims as it goes on, with his friends rallying their sceptical class mates to the cause.

It’s a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously though – director Jacob Tiernay has said that he tried making serious political films before coming to the realisation that “Fuck me. I am not Ken Loach.” So if you’re looking for a deadly serious appraisal of Leon Trotsky, his life and ambitions, this is not that film (FAO: boring trot blogs). But for what The Trotsky is, a quirky high school comedy in the vein of Wes Anderson, with some radical politics thrown in for good measure, it’s a decent watch and pretty funny, and enough in-jokes to keep leftie viewers entertained, but without making it totally inaccessible to people who haven’t written a thesis on the Russian Civil War.

ps. The Trotsky is now out on DVD in Canada. It hasn’t been released in Europe, and isn’t available on Region 2, but there are a few torrents kicking about the internetz…