Secondary Year: Loose Teen Comedy | by Lagarde

Reliving one’s senior year of high school is somehow impossible, but an emphatic wish for some dreamers who then feel like they’ve missed something. However, for Stephanie Conway (Rebel Wilson), it is a requirement: she fell into a coma around the year 2000 after she (actress Angourie Rice of Easttown Mare plays the younger version of Conway) ends up having bad luck during a cheerleading stunt. When she wakes up two decades later, she is “a 17-year-old in the body of a 37-year-old.” Yes, this all sounds pretty absurd, but Secondary year shouldn’t have overly critical viewers. But especially for movie lovers like clueless (1995) and songs like Avril Lavigne’s Sk8er Boi.

The film is a great excuse to feature the darlings of the creators – American sweet pop culture from the mid-90s to the 2010s. And of course the film also references terrible friday (2003), in which a mother and her daughter switch bodies. Although Conway soon comes to the conclusion that her fate is something more tragic: after all, she has stood still for 20 years. She therefore needs to be updated on morals, manners. What else can you say? What not? This produces bland scenes, like when Conway sees a smartphone: “Hey, is that a small TV?”

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Another strange and insignificant aspect of the story is that Conway once immigrated from Australia to the United States. For Wilson to be able to smile in Aussie seems to be the only argument. The question arises as to how resilient these genres of fanatical high school comedies are. It’s always about the superficiality of being popular. Teenagers, or in this case 30-somethings for that matter, always want to be popular, to be seen. It happens in Secondary year also without the irony that you constantly find, for example, in a series like PEN15: This comedy also revolves around high school nostalgia, but deals with that theme in a much smarter way.

And above all: is Rebel Wilson really funny? Has she ever been?