Sometimes the nationality IS the selling point and maybe that's what got me to sit through the whole thing.
My bias as transatlantic media consumer is that this totally feels like a professional job. Even if not every likes it, it's a respectable take on the teen dramedy genre with well developed characters and a plot that (mostly) keep moving.
It's bemusing how certain elements just sort of show up together; we begin with a story of one girl's internal life being publicized, continue into a story of old and new friendships developing and in the end it's a commentary on fascists we let run schools.
Piece by piece it all works but it's hard to find thematic unity here and maybe we don't need to. We have a sympathetic heroin and a visually appealing vision of a landscape and a community. The Cerano de Bergerac angle thankfully doesn't take up TOO much time and the rekindling of an old friendship suffers from having zero ground work placed on it. The Dilla character (David's affections) is often hard to like and I wish she had been called out on her nonsense more.
It's infuriating to watch that human garbage they call a vice-principal fixate over nothing in a dystopian way but at least we're supposed to hate her and the pay-off is good enough.
