Suck Me Shakespeer (2013)

Fack ju Göhte arrives from Germany with its title scrubbed for American sensibilities and its premise left intact. An ex-convict buried his stolen money beneath a school gymnasium, returns to retrieve it, and is mistaken for a substitute teacher. Chaos follows, lessons are absorbed, and the German box office handed over fifty-five million euros, as it tends to do for this sort of thing. It is a broad and loud comedy that knows precisely what it is, which is more than can be said for most films with a Shakespeare pun in the marketing.

The film's multiculturalism deserves a moment of sober attention, largely because it is so unbothered. Elyas M'Barek, Gizem Emre, and Aram Arami occupy the frame as Turkish-German teachers and students in a rough urban school, and nobody in the screenplay pauses to congratulate the production for it. The immigrant experience surfaces in asides about welfare dependency and futures in the drug trade, handled as texture for jokes instead of argument. Inequality gets noticed the way a bus notices a pothole. This is representation as set dressing, organic to the setting and indifferent to any larger project.

The gender arrangements are equally conventional. A woman runs the school, a woman teaches the class, and the story still belongs to the man who learns to feel something. A modest moral hums underneath the pratfalls: stay in school, avoid welfare, collect your diploma. It arrives through slapstick and a paintball gun, so the sermon never quite lands as a sermon. Absent entirely are the other markers of contemporary cultural anxiousness. No queer subtext, no climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent awakening, no revision of the historical record, and no critique of the money that made the whole enterprise possible. What remains is a competent, cheerful comedy about a criminal who becomes a decent teacher. The ledger stays nearly blank, and the film seems content with that.