The latest in our series of writers celebrating their favourite comfort watches is an ode to John Hughes’s 1980s classic
I
t’s hard to ignore a film’s message when the main character is addressing you directly down the barrel of the camera. Granted, the first time I watched the 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I was the impressionable age of 11 and “Look people in the eyes when they’re talking to you” was on constant rotation in my household. So my green eyes met Ferris’s brown ones and I took it all in.
Centred around Matthew Broderick’s playful turn as Ferris Bueller, a high school senior faking illness to skip school, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is certainly a celebration of the carefree, though the story is by no means languid. Made frantic by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do with the aid of a red Ferrari, the day speeds by in comparison to the fictional days of other American teen films, such as American Graffiti and Dazed & Confused – which, to be fair, features a decent amount of marijuana.
The pace owes itself to the constant change in location. Once Ferris’s doting parents fall for a clammy-hands stunt (“lick your palms”), his day is well and truly off. With charm and, yes, a bit of verbal manipulation, he wrangles his best friend, Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck), and his girlfriend, Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara), out of the North Shore suburbs of Chicago to tour the city’s many offerings, all while escaping the clutches of a jealous sister and a wrathful dean of students.
