Film Review: ARNOLD IS A MODEL STUDENT: A Disjointed but Subtly Powerful Study on Authority, Morality, and Righteousness [Locarno 2022]

Arnold is a Model Student Review

Arnold is a Model Student / Arnon pen nakrian tuayang (2022) Film Review from the 75th Annual Locarno Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Sorayos Prapapan, starring Korndanai Marc Dautzenberg, Siriboon Naddhabhan, Winyu Wongsurawat, Yanin Pongsuwan, Niramon Busapavanich, and Virot Ali.

Younger generations are always at the forefront of revolutions and cultural shifts – out with the old, in with the new, and off with the conservative shackles of tradition. In many ways, the kids are always, most certainly, all right.

Sorayos Prapapan harnesses that sentiment with his feature debut Arnon pen nakrian tuayang: a disjointed yet sly dissection of the Thai education system, and a morality play about standing strong in an increasingly immoral world.

Set at the end of the current school semester and continuing into next year, Arnon pen nakrian tuayang (or “Arnold Is a Model Student” in English) opens with the titular Arnold (Korndanai Marc Dautzenberg) being praised in a schoolwide assembly for an astounding academic record and a recent win at the international Mathematics Olympiad. His image-obsessed headmaster (Virot Ali) plasters the school’s entrance with a large banner of the trophy-adorned Arnold, showing off the win as a community stature boost. Meanwhile, Arnold coasts on his wave of adoration and favoritism through the start of his senior year by teasing fellow students, coming to class late, sneaking out during breaks for a shot of whiskey and a smoke, and making memes about his uptight professor (Niramon Busapavanich).

While Arnold can escape discipline with not so much a scratch, his peers aren’t so lucky: hair that is too long or dyed gets forcibly cut off; the smallest of dress code violations result in demerits on students’ personal records; and teachers openly mock and ridicule students for the slightest bit of question to their authority. When one of Arnold’s pupils (Siriboon Naddhabhan) catches a teacher caning a group of boys, she stages classroom walkouts and on-campus protests to demand an entire structural revamp of the school’s hierarchy. Her movement quickly gains followers and momentum, much to the chagrin of the headmaster and the rest of his staff.

But it’s among all these alleged troublemakers that Arnold is opportunistically absent. He might take part in a walkout to skip class, but he refuses to put his name on a petition demanding administrative reform (as he fears it’ll hinder his university prospects the following year). Likewise, he doesn’t join his friends at their demonstrations but rather just stays on the outskirts of other pro-democracy protests whenever he’s feeling moody – most likely only to look dangerous and to worry his mom. Instead, Arnold uses his free time to score extra cash from a tutoring hustler (Winyu Wongsurawat), and as the senior year wears on he grows more and more distant from his classmates as he isolates into his own bubble of success.

That bubble is where Prapapan really zeroes in, interrogating what the titular phrase “model student” implies and, at a more basic level, what it means to be a good person. Arnold is a smart kid who gets good grades and knows how to behave when it matters (that is, when authority is present), but he still breaks the law and in doing so allows others to further exploit the educational system through its current pay-to-play set-up. The moral quandary the film posits isn’t whether or not he will get caught, but whether or not he can live with propagating such a corrupt system. Prapapan’s slow and subtle build to this thematic revelation really wallops with its final shots, as the film juxtaposes Arnold’s sheer loneliness on his way to personal success with his peers’ sense of community in their Bad Student movement canvassing and protests.

But “slow and subtle” is the key phrase, and it takes the film a while to really settle into that groove – much less the characterization of Arnold himself. It’s understandable that Arnold has his troubles – an early scene of conflict with his teacher reveals that his father is a French expat and assumed journalist who was recently deported over political dissidence – as well as his flaws – outside of the cheating ring he mocks his less-bright classmates by feeding them false information to recite for in-class embarrassment – but he’s not any more cruel nor malicious than any other teenager would be. Yet, Prapapan in his slice-of-life approach can’t decide on a particular way to frame Arnold to the audience, oscillating between sympathetic to shallow to empathetic to rude. The end result feels disjointed: a complex character presented in the most jumpy and surface-level fashion.

The film overall has similar problems of identity, unsure of where to inject comedy and how to do it. The frequent distortion from the wide-angle lenses and the hyper-focus on the school’s dedication to conservative cultural mannerisms teases an absurdist bent, but Prapapan never really commits to that approach. Even when given the benefit of the doubt via its slice-of-life essence it moves from one scene to the next quite clunkily, which makes the overall execution rather stilted. It irons that out by the second half, of course, but that’s still leaves us with a rough 40-odd minutes on the front end.

Regardless, the way that Prapapan is able to turn things around and end on such a strong note in a single film – an 80-minute-long one, no less! – suggests a worthy cinematic voice on the horizon. This is a messy movie about the fight to stand in your truth … and I guess it only makes sense that the film itself metaphorically mirrors its content.

Rating: 6/10

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