“Bad Apples” in the cinema | You're annoying!

The teacher Maria is simply brilliantly portrayed by Saoirse Ronan, who usually plays positive roles. Photo: Pulse Films Maria Spencer (Saoirse Ronan) actually wants to be a good teacher. But Danny (Edie Waller), a fifth-grade student she teaches, is violent, constantly disruptive and elusive. One evening when she visits the understanding but completely overwhelmed single father, who works as a highly stressed parcel driver, she catches Danny on the way home, who is demolishing her car with an iron bar. She holds him, they wrestle, he suddenly faints, she takes him to her house, another physical altercation ensues. Danny runs away and ends up in the basement, quite by chance, where the good teacher simply locks the door. Jonathan Etzler's film "Bad Apples" is tough fare. Maria, the teacher, leaves Danny locked in the basement for months while a search for the missing child starts, in which she even takes part. Work at school, which previously didn't work at all, is suddenly no longer a problem. The class is thriving, as is the teacher, because there is no longer any annoying Danny around. Meanwhile, tied up in Maria's basement, he plays video games, gets tutoring, and, in true Stockholm Syndrome style, even becomes a little friendly with his kidnapper and has to defecate in a bucket.

Films about the relationship between teachers and students are rarely realistic. This also applies to İlker Çatak's successful film "The Teacher's Room", which depicts a completely absurd school life that has nothing to do with reality. It's the same with "Bad Apples", where the poor teacher Maria is left completely alone with the stubborn and absolutely violent student. The director explains to her that this is her job. But school doesn't work that way. Neither do all the parents scream at each other like frightened chickens at parents' evening, nor are there classes in which everyone works constructively on paradisiacal social interaction like in "Bad Apples" as soon as the one disruptive student has left. This does not describe a social relationship, which school is above all, but comes from the toolbox of cheap socio-political prejudices that are often used by populists and right-wing demagogues. Now, of course, one could postulate that "Bad Apples" should be understood as a bitter allegory of an education system that sorts students like the apples that give the title in a huge machine, squeezes them and produces a distillate from them - as can also be seen at the beginning of the film.

Films about the relationship between teachers and students are rarely realistic.

But that's a little thin for this type of film, which gives the impression that it can't really decide whether it wants to formulate something critical or whether it primarily wants to entertain with a politically incorrect wink. Teacher Maria is of course tormented by a guilty conscience, but realizes that she and everyone else are doing so much better. So just keep it up! Until the rather strenuous student Pauline (Nia Brown) stalks Maria, finds out her secret and blackmails her from then on. All the children in this film, which is sometimes reminiscent of Wes Anderson in its absurd style, are as if carved out of adult prejudices. And above all, they are annoying. That's the difference to Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom", where the kids fight for their rights in a very bizarre way, but are incredibly empowering in the process. In "Bad Apples" one slapper of the thigh follows another, each time suggesting that it's actually not such a bad thing to lock children away sometimes. And the parent representatives at Maria's school see it the same way. The most exciting moment in the film is when the annoying Pauline plays a song at parents' evening that tells everyone about Danny's fate.

The parents' reaction? Don't rush into anything, leave the troublemaker locked up where he is, don't call the police and just let Danny's precariously working, parcel-delivering redneck father, who despairs over his son's disappearance and is then even suspected by the police, stew in his own juice. At the latest, the sympathy for Maria is over. This is simply brilliantly embodied by Saoirse Ronan, who usually plays positive roles. But the collective willingness to suspend children's rights in order to maximally promote their own offspring points to a very fundamental problem in our education system that also prevails in other countries. The classist and (and mostly above all) racist segregation in the educational sector, which is already the order of the day in primary schools, is intended to be caricatured here. Only those who know the mechanisms that prevail there, with which educated middle-class white parents isolate themselves in their bubble, should be left laughing. At the very end there is a twist that suggests that the whole thing is falling on the feet of the self-satisfied authoritarian adults, who of course only lock children up in emergencies. At least that!

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