Mr. Bachmann and His Class (2021, Maria Speth) (Patreon)

43/100

Too therapeutic for my taste, and also just way the hell too long. I don't imagine that Speth meant for the English title to have a double meaning, but Mr. Bachmann is in fact unfailingly classy, as well as kind, understanding, patient, empathetic, and every other characteristic that a teacher should possess (especially when most of his students are fairly recent immigrants with a still-rudimentary grasp of their new home's primary language); this is immediately evident and doesn't subsequently get complicated in any way, which means that Bachmann never turns into overdrive*, remaining in the same low-key, observational, this-is-how-school-should-be gear for closing in on four hours. Admirable, but unmemorable—I watched the film's first third "at" TIFF '21 before bailing due to lack of interest, and virtually nothing from that hour and a quarter had stuck with me. Sitting through the rest did create a stronger emotional bond with some students, but only a headstrong Bulgarian girl named Stefi genuinely struck me as a first-rate camera study; her inability to articulate why she finds homosexuality "disgusting," when Mr. Bachmann gently presses her, is one of the film's two standout moments, with the other being Jamie's refusal to help someone else study because he's invested in the belief that poor marks are a sign of innate inferiority (though he can't quite articulate that either). Each of those scenes runs several painstaking, engrossing minutes and feels like the single exchange that Wiseman would cull from many hours of filming one classroom; here, they wind up engulfed in bland affirmation. I gave almost exactly the same blah rating to Nicolas Philibert's highly acclaimed To Be and to Have, a very similar (albeit much shorter) French doc, and had mixed feelings about Cantet's semi-fictionalized Palme d'Or winner The Class, so evidently "Let's watch this heroic teacher at work" just doesn't hold much appeal for me—as I say, the better (s)he is (and it's worth noting with a slight frown that all of the above are men, despite the profession's longstanding general feminization), the more it comes across like watching a skilled child therapist, which ain't what I want from cinema. And there's just no reason I can see why this particular example needed to be as long as The Duellists and Blade Runner combined. 

* Bit forced, sorry.