2023-10-12 11:25:30
Since we now send warnings in advance of every self-respecting film, we want to keep it that way at this point. Traditionalists, advocates of the literary purity law, must now be somewhat strong. Or look for the following warning somewhere else on the site.
So. Erich Kästner’s young adult novel “The Flying Classroom” – published in 1933, banned in 1936, first brought to the screen in 1954 with Erich Kästner himself – has been filmed for the fourth time and for the first time by a woman, by Caroline Hellsgård.
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Twenty years ago, last time, when Ulrich Noethen was the philanthropic boarding school head Doctor Justus Bökh and Sebastian Koch was the non-smoker, Justus’ long-lost best friend, the boys’ boarding school at the Johann-Sigismund-Gymnasium in Kirchberg, Upper Bavaria, had become the St. Thomas Choir .
The fall of the Wall played a role, the play “The Flying Classroom” became a rap musical, and a few girls were even allowed to join in, that was all that was needed – the Thomaners are, after all, a boys’ choir.
In the meantime, Gerrit Hermans, who had to realign Kästner’s actually indestructible classic in his script for the generation of digital children who generally read little, is blocked from escaping into this anti-diversity hiding place. If he didn’t want to make himself ridiculous and the target of various shitstorms.
Our teacher Doctor Bökh: Tom Schilling as head of the boarding school
Quelle: UFA Fiction/ LEONINE
So now finally the final warning. The Johann Sigismund boarding school is apparently in South Tyrol, more precisely on Lake Reschen. The mountains are beautiful. The sky is blue.
Because the boarding school in the picturesque castle like Hogwarts on the mountain, like the high school at its feet, has now been opened to all genders, poor Martin Thaler is just a girl and is called so that the parents don’t get confused, who know their Kästner by heart and go to the cinema with your children, Martina.
Jonathan Despite’s name is Jo and he is also a girl and, apart from that, dark-skinned. If you, as an orthodox Kästnerian, find this too much of a kowtow to the spirit of the times, please excuse me at this point and leave me free to read elsewhere.
Everything begins in Neukölln
For everyone else, we would now have to explain why Classroom 4.0 works wonderfully and why it doesn’t. And why Erich Kästner, after having been in the literary heaven for almost fifty years, will also survive this modernization. Maybe even better than ever.
So. Let’s switch to Neukölln. Martina lives in one of the residential silos that we know from “4 Blocks”. She is her own family. The mother is a single parent, works shifts, and Martina has to be more adult than she is – cook, keep things tidy, look after her brother.
It’s not entirely understandable why someone came up with the idea of letting her apply for a scholarship to the boarding school in the mountains, without which everything would collapse. However, she gets it, she cheers, her brother is rather reserved, and then – like Harry Potter before – she rides on a picturesque train through the picturesque area already described.
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Now, apart from the mentioned gender openness, everything is the same as it was in Upper Bavaria in 1933. The externals have been waging war against the internals for as long as students can remember. Some are at the bottom, others at the top of the mountain, maybe that’s why. Because children’s films are filmed during the summer holidays, it is hot at Lake Reschen – Kästner told the story of an ever-increasing Advent complete with a bloody snowball fight. The holidays are approaching. Why Martina has to start so late in the school year is one of the many mysteries of this film that you shouldn’t worry too much about.
As soon as he arrived in Kirchberg, Kästner’s legend of friendship purrs in largely barely modernized sketches in the most beautiful, touching and routine way. Jo Despite has a barely believable post-migrant background – her mother, they say, abandoned her to flee to Brazil and the foster parents are looking for her.
The Justus (Tom Schilling, as an exemplary boarding school director, is an advertisement for every teaching institute with compulsory residency) and the non-smoker (Trystan Pütter tells the story, including its unforgettable life wisdom, balsamically from the off, wears painted fingernails and creaks like he used to in “Kudamm 56”) a threadbare back story that has not been fully told is made up.
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Bullying, classism, racism – a little bit of everything that is currently relevant is mixed in with the classic classroom themes that a Kästner film cannot avoid. Psychology stumbles. The plot lags behind.
Supporters of the literary purity law who have persevered this far can still rest assured. “The Flying Classroom” remains a good, essential story. One that you don’t want to withhold from your children and grandchildren, maybe you’re not even allowed to.
And in the end you read them again at the edge of the bed. If Hellsgård’s variant contributes to this, everyone would have won.
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