The apple is such a loaded metaphor. It is the fruit of knowledge. It is the original sin. It is usually the first thing that comes to mind when associating words and images to the individual letters of the alphabet. It is what a keen student might give to a teacher, or a wicked witch to her victim. A bad apple spoils the bunch, in law enforcement, community or classroom.
Many of these things are at play in a bold and brassy fashion in Bad Apples, a savage satire of modern pedagogy. Subtle this film is not. Apples are heard, dropping with dull thunks, before the primary coloured title card slam-bangs onto the screen.
It is obvious from the opening seconds that this film is not going to beat around the (apologies in advance) bushel. The film is both the basest of wish fulfilment and of pandering, but also, gives the people what they want, until they realise their folly, I guess?
A field trip at the local cidery goes wrong when problem student Danny literally sabotages the entire operation by tossing his shoe into the factory floating fruit. The sequence is brilliant, like the click, click, click of a theme park ride going to the top of the first hill. Danny’s young teacher, Maria Spencer, is introduced at her wits' end when the principal blames her for not controlling her class, which resulted in misrepresenting the private school in public. The condescending scolding includes the bon mot that handling the behaviour of difficult children is part of teaching. Ms. Spencer wilts.
In Ashton Brook primary school, Ms. Spencer’s class aspires to be a “Can Do classroom” but is in absolute chaos. Danny is feral in his rage and misbehaviour as he literally destroys Ms. Spencer’s classroom, bullying the other kids without shame, taking any and all focus away from learning, and ending her relationship with her boyfriend, who also happens to be the vice-principal at the school. The parents and the bureaucracy do not understand how this one kid is ruining her sanity, her career, and her life. When Danny tosses the class overachiever, a mousey little girl with pink glasses named Pauline, down the stairs, something has to give.
In a normal, sane, world Danny would be suspended or put in therapy, or probably drugged with the latest pharmacological tranquillizer after his behaviour. However, in Jonatan Etzler’s unsparing satire Bad Apples, Ms. Spencer goes another way. She decides to lock the bad student up in the basement of her house, still under construction after her relationship crumbled apart.
The purpose of the kidnapping, regardless of the extenuating circumstances, is to free her classroom from distraction to let the other kids thrive, as well, allow her to use more drastic, unsupervised methods of teaching Danny how to sit up straight and learn his letters. While the school administration is undergoing a bureaucratic inspection, and the police are sniffing around for the missing student, Ms. Spencer digs herself into a deeper hole as her classroom both achieves better focus and "extracurricular" results, even for Danny, who she teaches between outbursts and basement feedings, but causes other rifts.
The modern education system was, according to some, designed to teach future factory and industrial workers to be “punctual, docile, and sober.” It is not simply the bad apples that needed to be weeded out, but also those that are sweeter, richer, and who would torque power and validation to transcend the rules.
Pauline, despite her broken arm, puts Ms. Spencer in a different kind of bind that culminates in an outrageous situation reminiscent of the parent group in Park Chan-Wook's Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, who after being party to an obscene act, need to figure out how to present the situation to the world, and themselves. Instead of South Korean awkward maximalism, we get the Scandinavian dry humour of the Swedish source novel De Oönskade by Rasmus Lindgren.
The roller coaster along the way is very much worth the price of admission here, if you realize that Bad Apples is as much a theme park amusement as it is a breezy analysis of relative cause. A wonderfully at-the-brink Saoirse Ronan, as Maria who finds empowerment through unchecked power, in the name of compassion. The brutal truth that a tightly knit community might find a way to ignore certain transgressions in the name of the individual success of their own children, might feel impractical in its execution here, but it works if you are willing to suspend disbelief, but Etzler understands how to leave the audience on the hook.
Bad Apples would make an interesting double bill, or mirror, with lker Çatak’s The Teachers Lounge. The latter is grounded by unhinged division of unity in the classroom by a petty crime, and the former is an unhinged unity of division by a major crime.
Both are funny in their own way.