Like an eye-opening snapshot that breaks through the rose-tinted memories of high school, the deadpan Events Transpiring Before, During, and After a High School Basketball Game is a uniquely hysterical look at the mundanity of adolescence filtered through the supposed dramatics of the sports film super genre. With his verbosely titled debut feature, writer-director Ted Stenson laces an ensemble cast of mostly amateur actors around a Robert Altman level of running subplots and storylines to craft a comedic experience like few others. In fact calling them “storylines” is a tad disingenuous as these floating plot lines Stenson intermittently checks in on over the course of a single day in 1999 at a fictional Calgary high school can feel like self-contained vignettes which coagulate into miniature arcs. Rarely, however, do they ever feel like they are working towards the kinds of narrative payoff we have come to expect from other sports films. To underline the point, Stenson deprives his audience of any of the actual game that is apparently central to the film and instead looks to the margins to let the humour of the humdrum shine through.
As indicated by the title, the film is broken into chapters based around this basketball game (before the game, first half, post game etc.) which in turn are broken up among a series of character groups who have their own freestanding stories. Recounting them all is a fool’s errand for a review because the point of the film is to highlight the boring goings-on that transpire on the periphery of the supposed main attraction, but some stick out and the way Stenson develops them over the course of these chapters is skillful to say the least. As the Coach and the Assistant Coach (Paul Cowling and Kim’s Convenience star Andrew Phung) engage in a power struggle over a complicated strategy in their losing effort to an undefeated team, the players engage in naive discussions of existentialism and cinema inspired by the recently released The Matrix. While this goes on, a referee (Jay Morberg) searches for his lost dog roaming the school after a particularly bitter argument with his girlfriend, and a radical theater company is trying to find a way to protest the schools’ decision to censor their “post-colonial” staging of King Lear — deciding impulsively to dump a bucket of blood on the basketball court which splinters the group.
All these plot lines are underlined for how insignificant they ultimately are, while some weave in and out of the central basketball game in interesting, plot-thickening ways and many stay isolated in humorous little tableaus. Stenson keeps his audience engaged over the course of these mundane plot points through his mesmerizing stoic style. Consisting exclusively of stationary long takes which periodically switches betweens the various storylines, the film has a particularly candid feel as if we are eavesdropping on these characters as they go about their business.
Coupled with the majorly amateur cast and their straightlaced but effective performances, the film carries a poignant authenticity to its depiction of everyday high schoolers, endeavoring to show the trivial moments of life such as when the players speculate whether the undefeated team has a “big guy who can dunk” or when the theater troupe are spitballing ideas for their protest or a new radical interpretation of Shakespeare they can perform instead (settling on Twelfth Night with Viola and Cesario played by conjoined twins, somehow). Partnered with editor/cinematographer Guillaume Carlier who imbues the film with an inert intrigue, Stenson feels as if he is channeling the comedies of Yasujiro Ozu with Events’ sustained stasis and its weaving of amusing non-sequiturs around a subdued plotpoint.
As we move through its segments and the central basketball game shrinks in importance in the film’s overall purview, the film seems to be making a salient observation about the high school experience overall while it skewers the overly dramatic structure of your rank and file sports film. With each of the storylines ending in somewhat of an anticlimax (the Assistant Coach’s desire to run a “triangle offense” based on famed coach Phil Jackson’s play, for example, ends with the players failing to understand the strategy while down by 40 points), Events reveals the truism that high school is never as romanticized as we remember it. The stirring events such as the big game certainly happen, but what we never truly appreciate are the little things that happen around it — the times when we are just shooting the breeze with our buddies about frivolous topics such as what is the best Francis Ford Coppola movie or whether or not we live in a simulation.
Far from being the bland exercise in dramatic inaction, Events Transpiring… revels in the absurdity of the mundane and brings the laugh through pitch perfect deadpan comedy, memorable lines, masterful overlap of storylines and memorable characters. Moreover, with the relative means of its microbudget, the film charms with its novel approach to the sports film and its intoxicating stoic style. If this film fails to leave a mark on you or you find yourself resistant to its hypnotic presentation of the monotonous high school existence, that is probably because you expected the traditional sports film, the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school basketball, to paraphrase an infamous Riverdale quote. Events isn’t that film and it is all the more memorable and interesting because of it.
