The Breakfast Club

The Breakfast Club (1985) takes place during a Saturday detention and is set almost entirely in a library. Five high school students are being punished. The athlete, the popular girl, the brain, the criminal and the strange one. The principal sets them an essay: tell me who you think you are. They talk for eight hours and that is the film. The reason it lasted is that it introduces its characters as types and then dismantles the types one by one. Each of them has something wrong at home, and the somethings are not alike: pressure, neglect, violence, invisibility. John Hughes wrote the script in a very short time, a matter of days. Where it departs from the teen films before it is that it writes young people not as the material for comic situations but as people to be taken seriously. The library is not real; a gymnasium in a closed high school was built out as one. The essay at the end is also read at the beginning, so the film opens and closes on the same sentence. Seen now, parts of it have dated badly. The way the criminal treats the popular girl, and the film presenting that as romantic progress, is seriously criticised. It runs 98 minutes. Good for: the eighties, films about adolescence, and single location drama. Less good for: there is a scene that reads as harassment, and the resolution is reduced to a makeover.