This tissue-thin look at nine months in the lives of Stanford University freshmen seems mostly aimed at reassuring parents that kids aren't doing drugs or sleeping around much in college anymore--not at $24,000-a-year Stanford, anyway. Everyone else will yawn and check their watches.
Living in a coed, multicultural residence, the freshmen in question are mostly straight white males, but the University has been careful to provide a trendy, unthreatening ratio of racial and sexual minorities. They include at least one bisexual white male, Nick, and a pair of white male
roommates whose sexuality is open to question. Of two black women on view, one, Brandi, grew up in white, middle-class suburbs and never had a black friend, while the other, Monique, has a crack-addicted mother and is attending college on a scholarship. Asian-American male Cheng breaks a
stereotype: an Ohio native, he fails a class in his first semester and begins contemplating a transfer either to less-rigorous Miami of Ohio or to Kent State. The two principal white females, Debbie and Shayne, are both blonde and conservative. Debbie may not have the intellectual equipment for
Stanford. At a meeting with her English teacher, she confounds his attempts to get her to think by struggling to find the answers he wants to hear. Shayne, from a strict conservative religious upbringing, develops her own form of prickly feminism that disturbs her parents and makes her a little
hard to live with around male dorm rooms, where posters of scantily-clad women cover the walls.
Nick finds his dormmates immature and avoids them by involving himself in political activism. Around the dorm, he's largely accepted by the others for who he is, though some of the males edgily discuss how they might react the first time he brings a man home for the night. It never becomes a
real issue, as Nick apparently remains chaste through his freshman year. Indeed, there is no visible sexual interaction among any of the students, although there's a lot of talk. Other familiar rituals are covered--cramming for exams, the first drunken blowout party, anguishing over grades, and
pledging to sororities and fraternities.
Minor conflicts arise later in the semester. The two possibly gay roommates are interrogated by dormmates. The women confront the straight guys with rising stridency. Monique begins shirking her work, and considers dropping out. When pledge time comes around, the women are ambivalent. The men
are mainly enthusiastic, including one who confesses that he relishes the chance to become a "player" after being a social non-entity during his high school years. And so it goes until the school year finally, and mercifully, ends.
Like MTV's much slicker reality-based series, "The Real World," this film addresses substantial issues only to withdraw nervously whenever they threaten to become too substantial. For what it is, FROSH is not badly made. And the results apparently have received enough positive reaction that
filmmakers Daniel Geller and Danya Goldfine reportedly plan a sequel. However, for all the insight they provide, they might just as well go ahead and hire professional actors and writers and pitch the whole thing as a fall TV sitcom. (Adult situations, profanity.) leave a comment
