Picture the most popular person in your high school. The image your conscious conjures may look like the star player of the local sports team, or maybe they look like the class clown, the fashionista, the model, or the bad boy. Walk into Lowell, a Californian public high school with a majority Asian-American student body, and the most popular person at school is the person with the highest-grade point average. It's the prodigy violin player. Or the president of the debate society. At Lowell, there's nothing more valuable among students than high achieving. And everyone wants a piece of the “pi” (I'm so sorry, it was right there).
“Try Harder!” is screening at the 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival
This is the world we're introduced to in the first few minutes of Debbie Lum's sharp, moving, anxiety-inducing documentary “Try Harder!”, a detour through the lives of a handful of seniors at the Lowell, the most competitive and high performing school in California, as they prepare to apply to the universities of their dreams. Premiering at this year's Sundance Festival and currently playing at SDAFF, “Try Harder” is Lum's second feature – following her scathing doc on “yellow fever” and Asian fetishism in 2012's “Seeking Asian Female” – and a fascinating insight into the bizarre world of high-pressure academia.
Lum touches on a lot of nuances in “Try Harder!” that really makes this story one to ponder over. She explores themes such as how race informs whether a student will be accepted by a university or not (and how that leads to further prejudice among students of different races at Lowell), white privilege (the ending is superbly executed and will leave you conflicted), the high expectations of first-gen immigrant and minority parents, and the surprisingly tricky task of distinguishing what you really want and what's expected of you.
What really makes “Try Harder!” resonate are the subjects themselves. The five or six students that are the main focus of Lum's lens are infectiously endearing, witty, self-aware, and so determined that it verges on genuine heartbreak at times to see them so racked with anxiety over their academic and professional futures. It's ironic that they are so likeable and put simply, utterly themselves, since many of the Ivy League Colleges that they're applying for have a bias against Lowell for supposably producing, as the students put it, ‘AP machines” (AP = Advanced Placement Tests = College Credit), a judgement clearly rooted in Asian stereotype. The statistics don't make the situation any easier, as even among the top students there is only a 1 in 5 chance that they'll get accepted into Stanford, which is considered the cream of the crop of ivy league colleges. In a typical high school comedy-drama-romcom (you know who you are), the kid with a booming social life can easily get into Stanford. The reality is much more disheartening, as the majority of the students in this doc sacrifice everything and at no fault of their own, get very little in return. And you see it getting to them constantly throughout the movie; underneath the self-deprecating humour and optimistic attitudes, there's an ever-present voice whispering “you're not doing enough.”
It's all quite heavy stuff, but Lum executes it with a high school comedy breeziness that eases you in to the harsh realities of the narrative, as well as the students, as aforementioned, being so thoughtful and likeable – Alvin, a class clown dance-lover and budding brain surgeon, is a particular standout. Emotionally intelligent and humorously quick-witted, his orbit is impossible not to be caught up in, and him impossible not to root for.
Ultimately, Lum not only successfully inducts you into a world that is so alien to what you might consider a “typical high school experience”, but she also makes it the easiest thing in the world to empathise and be enveloped by the stories she's telling. Simultaneously funny and saddening, “Try Harder!” is a stimulating story told by Lum with a refreshing perspective – definitely a new cinematic voice to be excited about.
