Rich boys, film & television like things simple and are arrogant assholes. They are chauffeured to the elite college in a Rolls, parade through the line of languishing It girls in welted slippers and pull out thick wads of cash in case one of them rebels. Poor girls, on the other hand, are selfless Samaritans. They stand up for the needy on the bus, sneak through the lines of hissing It girls in shabby sneakers and refuse the big wads of money from rich guys instead of selling their backbone for it.
This is what happens in “Maxton Hall” when the staff of the bestselling adaptation of the same name are introduced. The elite pupil James, heir to the feudal court tailor Beaufort, wants to bribe the scholarship holder Ruby, hope for the future of the penniless wheelchair user Bell, with 10,000 pounds because she saw something compromising of his sister Lydia and could thereby harm the class-conscious clan.
But Ruby, a mixture of deer and predator embodied by Harriet Herbig-Matten (“Bibi & Tina”), cannot be bought. Especially not by James, as a mixture of salon lion and crybaby played by Damian Hardung (“Club of the Red Ribbons”), who, from Ruby’s point of view, embodies everything that is wrong in their forcedly united parallel world: “Oversized privilege, arrogance and ignorance”.
Right at the beginning of the first of six episodes of 45 minutes each on Prime Video, she turns down his offer and – as the melodramatically beautiful saying goes – makes a powerful enemy for herself. Equal parts indignant, irritated and goaded by the insubordinate rebelliousness, James plots a campaign of revenge that thwarts Ruby’s plans to get a scholarship to Oxford University with the help of charitable school activities.
Practically every cliché is declined
It is an unequal fight that the Hamburg author Mona Kasten devised in 2018. But it is also so stereotypical that the globally successful young adult material takes a direction that becomes clear at the latest when its leading characters meet for the second time. In literary theory, called from enemies to lovers, the two poles, despite all their repulsion, attract each other and in the end – no, even if a happy ending is foreseeable, this is of course not revealed given the two sequel novels…
But the fact is that director Martin Schreier – with coming-of-age clothes like “One Night Off” has behavioral problems – uses scripts by “Dark” author Daphne Ferraro to cover practically every new adult cliché for women up to 29. The rich are also the beautiful, athletic, well-formed ones, but tend to be cold-hearted, even sociopathic. The poor, on the other hand, often seem a bit awkward, but kind-hearted to the point of total self-sacrifice.
While James groans under the pressure of his dynastic, conservative father, Ruby’s extremely diverse picture book family is so altruistic and cheerful that one quickly longs for the zombie apocalypse of “Walking Dead”. Especially since everyone around is of course gay, someone gets pregnant, but Ruby somehow helps everyone out of trouble, which is why it wouldn’t be surprising if her father got out of the wheelchair in the end, miraculously cured.
Witches and vampires are missing from the booming subject of romance. But even though Eton graduate Boris Johnson teaches us how many elite college clichés of birth-privileged Brits are real, this collection is pretty schematic. So what?!, asks head writer Ferraro at the Berlin PR event, which even attracts South American and East Asian lifestyle reporters. “Maxton Hall” is “perhaps larger then life”, so instead of reality it creates “an escapist-emotional dream and longing world” through which a thousand clichés guide us.
But it is precisely these, Ferraro asserts, that “include the possibility of breaking them again.” Good to observe in James’s relationship with Lydia (Sonja Weisser). When he presents the new collection, his sister quietly speaks the text, which she is apparently allowed to write but is not allowed to present. At Beauforts, business is a man’s business. And the way the director stages this ambivalence is difficult for art house fans outside of the target group to bear. But anyone who gets involved in it will probably not be bothered by the fireworks of over-the-top contradictions and mine games.
The fact that Ruby has childhood trauma but no flaws is due to the law of unconditional identification of female protagonists. Unfortunately, this also means that Cinderella constantly starts giggling submissively as soon as the prince puts a ball dress on her. Great fumbles turn every feminist into a Barbie doll. As if Prime had filmed “Sex Education” at Guldenburg Castle, Martin Schreier also gives the hero duo two faces: While Harriet Herbig-Matten always looks defiant or delighted from the cheap lingerie, Damian Hardung looks desperate or snobbish from the expensive one.
Due to the lack of shades of gray, even a teacher who seduces his student can be liked. Govinda Golleti always looks so cute… Beyond toxic episodes like these, “Save Me” aka “Maxton Hall” does its job as routinely as the target group wants. And she wants it to be emotional, predictable, visually powerful, under-complex, but diverse, exciting and somewhat unruly, without being revolutionary. A bit like the “dream ship” of Generation Z. Both have their place.
All six episodes of the first season of “Maxton Hall” have been available to stream on Prime Video since May 9th