“Radical – A class of its own”: Film “Radical”: Sting the hornet’s nest

At first, the two films hardly differ: one, “Heroico,” which was shown at the Berlinale a year ago, is about a military academy in Mexico where young cadets are trained, and the other, “Radical – A Class for yourself,” elementary school students at a Mexican elementary school stand at attention during morning roll call and are told the same phrases every day: calm is the basis for obedience, obedience is the basis for discipline and discipline is the basis for learning. You can see in the eyes of the children and those of the soldiers that they unfastened their seat belts right from the start. The mind is not made for perseverance slogans like these; it wants to be free and needs warmth and recognition in order to develop. What is being done to people here instead is training them into a system in which only the fittest survive. This has a lot to do with Mexico, but has even more to do with functioning in an authoritarian meritocratic society in general. If you accept that this is the only way things can work out, you won’t ask unpleasant questions. Anyone who then realizes that they won’t get anywhere if they don’t participate is right in the middle of the fear system of the performance dictatorship – and it doesn’t just exist in Mexico.

Nevertheless, “Radical – A Class of Its Own,” the new film by Christopher Zalla, is an initially sobering look into modern Mexico. The school where the new teacher Sergio Juárez Correa (Eugenio Derbez, named the most influential Latin American man in the world by Variety magazine ten years ago) starts has produced the weakest students in the entire country in the last final exam. The new computers that were purchased some time ago were promptly stolen and no one has bothered to replace them for four years. The police control entry to the school. In the school library, the registration form is the only printed paper there is and the teachers are only willing to look up from the coffee cup in the break room when the principal gives a speech.

All in all, these are pretty crappy conditions for arousing curiosity and joy in learning in children. Even more so when the circumstances of life actually require them to be available to the family as a source of income as quickly as possible.

Director Zalla tells a story that really happened in a similar way, because a character like the teacher Sergio, who uses unusual teaching methods to make his students’ minds glow, really exists. Zalla became aware of the material through the double portrait of an exceptionally gifted student and her teacher in “Wired” magazine. 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno was dubbed “the next Steve Jobs” by Computer Magazine because she achieved the highest math exam score in Mexico despite attending a public school in one of the country’s seediest cities. Her teacher, the real Sergio Juárez Correa, had despaired about the Mexican school system and watched a TED video about a new teaching method that, based on decentralized learning, is intended to motivate students to acquire knowledge on their own initiative and not because the school wants to hammer it into them in order to end up with good graduation rates and the next funding. Using his YouTube lesson, Correa tries to circumvent the authoritarian frontal system. And it works. An incredible 93 percent of his students graduated in math, where half had previously failed, and ten other children in his year were among the top one percent in math. A success story made for a film.

And if “Radical” has a problem, it’s just this: in some places the film devotes too much attention to a cinematic cult of genius. Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), daughter of a garbage collector, is able to solve complicated arithmetic problems that only Carl Friedrich Gauss of her age could once crack. She constructs her own telescope from the scrap collected from the garbage dump next to her modest hut where she lives with her sick father. And so her story is the one that both the teacher and the audience should be drawn into most emotionally. This is very contrived and follows the usual calculation of Superbrain stories. This film has little to say about anyone who is poor and only normally or even barely talented.

When Paloma is the last to come through the school gate on the day of the final exam, her teacher breathes a sigh of relief, although little Lupe (Mía Fernanda Solis) also deserves so much attention because of a calculation question (how can 26 people be divided into six lifeboats). concerned with moral teaching and John Stuart Mill. Whether Mill is the best approach to getting the right result is anyone’s guess, but Lupe thinks it should be illegal to sell more tickets for a boat trip than there are seats in the lifeboats. Now you’re wondering why this child didn’t become the star of the film. But logically, instead of dealing with philosophy, Lupe has to look after her sibling, who has just been born, because her mother goes back to work to support the cash-strapped family. Lupe’s story ends here, while someone like Paloma will pick up one scholarship after another and make the better cover stories.

Apart from that, “Radical” is a cliché-free film about injustice and the power of idealism, which is not a given with these keywords. The story of the ambitious teacher in a class that has long since been written off certainly offers little creative scope, but Zalla uses it cleverly. He doesn’t exploit the miserable conditions in the working-class neighborhoods of the border city of Matamoros as poverty porn. He casually stages the victims of a gang shooting covered with shrouds when he shows the children’s journey to school, which develops a much stronger power than any riotously puffed-up men-with-gold-chains-shopping-strong scene would have achieved. The episode in which the class sits in a circle and discusses ethics while the school inspector stops by is great. In one minute, the superintendent learns everything there is to know about the taboo topics of corruption, abortion and contraception, explained by sixth graders.

“Radical,” which won the Audience Award at the 2023 Sundance Festival, is also being sold as a feel-good film in some reviews, which may be because if you want to accuse the film of evil, it tells a story of upward mobility, but That’s not even half the truth. It actually shows how fucked up a world is in which whoever is best trained to function usually wins.

»Radical – A class of its own«, USA 2023. Director: Christopher Zalla. With: Eugenio Derbez, Daniel Haddad, Jennifer Trejo. 122 minutes, start: March 21st.