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In Jonatan Etzler's 'Bad Apples', Saoirse Ronan plays a lonely primary-school teacher who kidnaps a troublesome student in a desperate attempt to help him. The film blends social comedy with a fable-like dark turn, questioning the role of traditional education and the ethics of intervention.
Though demanding a significant leap of faith from the audience, the film mixes satisfyingly darkish comedy with spiky social analysis. Bad Apples is certainly not much like anything else you will see this week.
It says something about Ronan's singular approach (and personal energy) that, after four Oscar nominations and two decades of fame, she is still perfectly believable as Maria, a sincere, lonely primary-school teacher in the English West Country. Nothing is more poignant here than her attempt to build a lesson plan around what we take to be one of her favorite songs.
Well, you know how cruel kids can be, and few manage much interest in Rickie Lee Jones's 'On Saturday Afternoons in 1963'. One student in particular, the troubled Danny (Eddie Waller), lives up to his already established reputation as a sadistic disrupter. Jess O'Kane's script, from a Swedish-language novel by Rasmus Lindgren, does not demonize its antagonist. From the beginning we get the sense Danny's behavior is a raw bawl for attention.
If the film has an argument it is that traditional school structures will struggle to accommodate any student who colors more than a little too far outside the lines. Maria could be forgiven for turning her back on him, but she makes genuine efforts to understand his frustration. A conversation with his no-nonsense father proves less than fruitful.
Even after Danny fractures the arm of diligent student Pauline (Nia Brown, about whom more later), our heroine still tries to make sense of him. All that comes to an end when the two have a violent encounter on a rainy night. Here is where that leap of faith is required. Maria kidnaps the boy and chains him up in her basement with only a mattress and a bucket for company.
The community search in vain as she becomes tortured with guilt and desperation. The problem here is that, to this point, Bad Apples has been pitched at the level of quasi-naturalistic social comedy. An enormous plausibility issue announces itself when it takes a lunge toward this darker place. This is a scenario Lars von Trier would relish.
We are, perhaps, being sold a fable or fairy-tale aesthetic. Chris Roe's carnivalesque score supports that reading. Danny comes across as the reluctant ogre and Maria as the confused villager whose rushed decisions land her in the ethical quicksand. One saving grace is the filmmakers' ability to find queasy comedy in even the most troubling plot turns.
Ronan channels the panicked desperation of a classic screwball heroine - but sadder, and more compromised, and with less hope of a happy ending. The latter sections of the film invite young Nia Brown to excel as the increasingly ghastly Pauline.
Somewhere in the third act, the injured student, who worships Maria, figures out what's been going on and exploits her knowledge to win favors from her idol, most hilariously when she is permitted to sing every verse of her own supernaturally terrible song. It's a delightfully bitter twist in a film that exhibits a strain of moral cynicism throughout. The troublemaker is a misused victim. The dedicated swat is beyond insufferable. Make of that what you will
Bad Apples Saoirse Ronan Jonatan Etzler Dark Comedy Social Analysis Kidnapping Education Moral Ambiguity
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