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SCHOOL
TRIP
8/10
Klassenfahrt
: Germany 2002 : Henner
Winckler : 85 mins
A
class of Berlin teenagers travel to a run-down resort on Poland’s Baltic
coast for a school trip. Official entertainments include day trips to
dull towns and museums, table tennis and beach volleyball. But the kids
spend more time making their own fun: alcohol binges, casual sex, picking
on each other, and sampling the dubious delights of Paradise Nightclub
the local disco where they mingle with the local youth. But boredom soon
sets in – especially for 16-year-old loner Ronny (Steven Sperling), who
seems stranded between the equally tedious worlds of adolescence and adulthood.
His mood isn’t improved when the only girl he has much time for, Isa (Sophie
Kempe), starts getting friendly with a local lad, Marek (Bartek Blaszczyk)…
World
cinema has never been short of films about alienated teenagers, but it’s
extremely rare to find one so consistently well-observed as School
Trip, an enormously promising debut from director Winckler, who co-wrote
the script with Stefan Kriekhaus. Their sympathetic understanding of the
rhythms and details of adolescent life recalls Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking
Amal – School Trip is very strong on the children’s sudden
jealousies and friendships, the harsh insider/outsider dynamics of teenage
cliques, their self-contained worlds designed to shut out blundering adults
– the teacher “in charge” is a spectacularly ineffectual, peripheral,
pretty much irrelevant figure.
But
while Moodysson tricked up his movie with a distracting reliance
on clumsy zooms and a wobbly hand-held camera, Winckler plays it mercifully
straight. As the bald, informative title suggests, this isn’t a project
that calls out for visual flash, sand Winckler’s strengths lie elsewhere
– principally in his handling of his young cast. He shows a rare knack
with actors, from the tiniest bit part to the three main leads, and he
conjures a sensational performance out of Sperling.
His
Ronny is a sustained feat of characterisation, mostly internalised, but
also packed full of amusing, revealing bits of business – the ‘solo ping
pong’ scene is worth the price of admission on its own. This is a young
man who moves between being the class clown, an idiot-savant, an artistic-genius-in-embryo,
and a would-be sociopath – sometimes all in the same scene. His young
face obscured by a bum-fluff moustache and encroaching sideburns, it’s
hard to tell his exact age, but he’s more mature than the rest of the
gang - his biggest problem isn’t that he doesn’t think enough, it’s that
he thinks far too much, although he actually says very little, and when
he does speak it’s largely to voice his contempt for these ‘jerks.’ He’s
so sardonic, in fact, that we can probably take the slogan emblazoned
across the back of his cheap nylon jacket, ‘Free Spirits Party Place’
as an intentional bit of irony on his part.
It’s
no accident that one of the museum trips see the bored-to-tears class
being told about the habits of ‘an early stone age tribe.’ They endure
the tedious lecture – only Ronny has the nerve to actually do something
about it. He’s also the only one who has enough ambition and daring to
break free of the resort’s dismal confines and explore the wider world,
if only for a few hours, just as he’s careful to liberate a wasp that’s
flown into one of the hotel rooms and keeps buzzing against the window,
anxious for freedom.
What
Ronny finds out there is sufficiently weird and funny (in an excellent
hitch-hiking scene) to make breaking free seem like the only sensible
option, even if the other kids see his tendency to ‘run away’ as a weakness.
By the end, however, things aren’t so clear-cut – events take a tragic
(though admirably unsentimental) turn, forcing Ronny into a searching
self-examination and ending the film on a sober, satisfyingly ambiguous
note, even as the credits roll to the upbeat racket of raucous Polish
rock. Winckler could do worse than to return to this character, and this
actor, in future years – Ronny could turn out to be the 21st
century’s Antoine Doinel, and then some.
17th
March, 2002
(seen 8th February, Delphi Berlin – Berlin
Film Festival)
by Neil
Young
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