Its one thing to create a gay coming out film but it is quite another to mix that theme with a middle-age crisis, heterosexual love affair and a coming-of-age story of teenage sexual awakening.

The burning question is: Who is it that will watch this movie and not be offended? Such issues were brought to the fore frequently by the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation and other backers as author/director Amnon Buchbinder and co-author Daniel MacIvor promoted and eventually executed this mixed bag of unorthodox social behavior.

That the resulting film makes the creative juices of the US film industry look like religious freedom in the former USSR, so much the better. But there is little quarter given for a film that bores, and this film is close to that. Everybody is just so...reasonable. And there is so much forgiveness and living and letting live that some will want to take in a slasher movie just to approximate a net real-life balance.

Co-author MacIvor is Don, a gay, middle aged, high school English teacher who has regular, compulsive, anonymous sex in a Nova Scotia restroom. He goes into the restroom, stands at a urinal until another visitor gives him a look, and then they do it.

Out of the blue he receives an unannounced visit from attractive parent Kaya (Rebecca Jenkins) during which she discusses the possibility of her son joining Don's class. This turns out to be a lucky break for all concerned, because Don is a pretty good English teacher and Kaya's son, Emerson (Aaron Webber), is a pretty smart kid. In fact, the home-schooled 13 year old has written and illustrated a 1000 page book in his parents' cabin in the woods. Emerson is also pretty cute for a guy (or for a girl, for that matter) and is experiencing the dawning of his sexuality. Trouble for a gay middle-aged school teacher? Do Eskimos play in the snow?

All is not well with Kaya and her self-obsessed hippie hubbie Rog (Robert Joy) who is out to save the world with unexplained environmental inventions that he cooks up in the family abode fueled by the yeasty heat of cabin fever. In spite of nude advances in the bedroom by Kaya, who is, in fact, the sexiest woman east of Saskatoon, Rog is in his own world. Kaya, insecure with her own desirability as her biological clock ticks on and losing her son to his own identity, looks elsewhere to the studly pick-up truck driver living down the road.

Bearing a striking likeness to Rebecca Miller's soft-spoken, elegant and sleep-inducing Ballad of Jack and Rose, this film will lose most of its family audience to its straightforward depiction of gay sex and its nebulous treatment of young Emerson's apparent gay leanings. This is not made any better for the average mom and dad by the fact that gay teacher Don seems to have double the self-image of the straight, cheating, self-obsessed married couple Rog and Kaya.

By far the most together person in the film is young genius Emerson, and what parent wants to show their teenager that? Dang kids think they are too smart already. If the film is a textbook vehicle for young talent Aaron Webber, what good will it do if few kids see it?

For couples in need of some relationship first aid, and even as a date movie for liberal singles, ‘Whole New Thing' might be just what the doctor ordered. It shows respect for open communications and differing life styles and lets the audience in on diverse feelings and ways of acting them out.

The photography is voluptuous and frosty and the scenery as pristine as the people; but the lack of edge and, for all practical purposes, humor, may be too much to pull the average stateside viewer to a night at the movies.

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