The expression “feelgood” is usually just an indicator of cheerful and positive content, but don’t forget it also works as an imperative. As in, you better feel good about this movie or its admirers will get very cross and maybe call you names. Such may well be the case with this Mexican comedy-drama about an unorthodox schoolteacher (winningly played by Eugenio Derbez); it is a film that a certain constituency of viewers is going love so passionately that woe betide any who might suggest that it is profoundly manipulative and unabashedly sentimental.
That said, there’s no gainsaying the skills of director Christopher Zalla and the cast, which is why, by the end, Radical earns the tears of bittersweet joy it yanks out from even the grouchiest of grouches. Zalla co-wrote the script with Laura Guadalupe, working from a 2013 Wired article by journalist Joshua Davis about a real-life teacher and his students called A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses.
Despite those based-on-a-true-story bona fides, the script is taut as piano wire, strings of inciting incidents strung like steel cables between concrete coincidences, ironies and tragedy. Derbez’s Sergio arrives at a failing school in border city Matamoros, Mexico, and promptly starts in with the O Captain! My Captain! Dead-Poets-style inspirationalism, inspiring his charges to think for themselves. Naturally this ruffles the feathers of the local authorities, who only care about exam results, as well as the many impoverished parents who need their offspring to finish sixth grade and then come home – in one case to help raise the younger siblings so mom can keep working in a factory and assist at the landfill site where the family earns a living from foraged scrap.
This last situation is the one that dogs serious young Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), but Sergio spots the girl has an extraordinarily beautiful young mind and a natural aptitude for maths. Will he be able to help her stay in school, along with boy-band-cute young Nico (Danilo Guardiola), a kid carrying a torch for Paloma but who is being pressured to join the local criminal gang with whom his brother now runs.
All the outcomes feel pre-ordained, right down to a climactic late arrival at the exam hall. But Zalla refrains from making the musical cues excessively weepy, and there’s enough grit and darkness around the margins to roughen things up. Meanwhile, he gets lovely, just-so performances from the kids: neither too knowing or drama-school pert, but still full of feeling, especially the copiously talented Guardiola.
• Radical is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 August.
