It's pretty much your typical high school: A class in it's final year
gets a new German teacher - who's simply nothing like their old teacher
the students loved but who has to now take maternity leave. Robert (Igor
Samobor) is smug, strict, and entirely self absorbed. He also uses his
superior knowledge of German as a way to express his superiority, and
obviously he enjoys to call his students losers. There is one student he
has a special relationship to though, Sabina (Dasa Cupevski), as he seems
to enjoy listening on her practicing on the class piano, so much so that
the other students think there's something more going on. One day though,
Sabina dashes out of his office, tears in her eyes ... and the next day
she's dead - suicide. The students soon have the gnawing suspicion that
it's Robert's fault, even words like pedophilia come into play, and when
he reacts to Sabina's suicide by incorporating it into his lessons about
Thomas Mann, he seems to be mocking them. The students, to young to
properly cope with the situation, protest, and the more Robert tries to
ignore their protests, the more he actually enrages them, so they
regularly leave his class, at one point run an insulting show over the
school radio, and they soon dub him a Nazi ... basically because he
teaches German. Robert has no recipe for this, neither the school
principal, who's only concerned with the school's reputation and tries to
move the blame from one person to the next until it sticks. But the
students soon fight among each other, as while some simply try to cope
with the loss of a friend, others want to actually get back at Robert, and
yet others want to fight the system - a situation that's bound to escalate
... For the most part, Class Enemy, a film entirely set
at a (real life) high school and partially based on real events, is a
quite remarkable film that doesn't try to reduce a complex drama to a
simple question of right and wrong, and that at the same time finds the
right balance between deep emotions and lighter moments, and it's
populated by rich characters portrayed by a strong ensemble cast.
Unfortunately, the film falls apart a little in its reconciliatory ending
that seems to be pulled out of the hat rather than built up to and that
leaves too many questions open. Still, a pretty good piece of work.
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