Entre les murs

I watched another French film in a row (after ""Il y a Longtemps que Je T'aime"). "Entre Le Murs" (known in English as "the Class") is the French bet for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and also the first French film to win the Palm D'Or of the Cannes Film Festival in 20 years. It is simply begging to be seen, so I did, despite knowing nothing about its subject matter.

"The Class" turns out to be a documentary-like movie about the tense interaction between teacher and students in a French multiracial high school. In particular, the film follows French grammar teacher Francois Marin who would like to think of himself as a progressive teacher who employs the interactive and self-discovery classroom technique, rather than by traditional lecture style.

However, most of his students are disturbingly belligerent, frank and disrespectful. The main conflict is with a particularly insolent Mali boy named Souleymane who has violent outbursts in class. But there are other students too from Tunisia, Morocco, China, the Caribbean, etc.. all of whom with their own personality and issues which the teacher has to deal with.

Everything in this film is very realistic indeed. It becomes even more personal after knowing that the lead actor who played Mr. Marin is Francois Begaudeau, who actually wrote the semi-autobiographical book about his experiences as a teacher, as well as adapted his own book for this film's screenplay. This is another instance when I am sure a lot of the richness of the language interplay will be lost in the subtitled translations.

A lot of people will find this film boring because of the two hour length, the single setting within the school, and no additional personal side stories about the teachers and students. But with my recent foray into the theory of Education in Graduate School, this film is quite an eye-opener about how different the school situation is these days. Definitely, this film has no Hollywood story arc and uplifting ending. It just tells the situation as it is. And that is precisely where its strength is.

Can't see the forest for the trees! It's very rare, indeed, when I'm at a staggering loss for words. Words are my business...having owned and directed my own language schools for 35 years. But when I sat down to write this, immediately after viewing "The Class", my unmitigated ire and unbridled outrage only produced that most dreaded of conditions, anathema to all reviewers: Writer's Block!

Several hours later, my blood having assuaged itself from boiling to simmer, I find myself, once again, anxious to share my impressions of this undeniably unique French film with you.

"Class" refuses to be pigeon-holed. Perhaps a Documentary-Drama fusion, but not really a Docudrama, either. More akin to reality TV,... only better! "Class" will certainly affect different people in strikingly different ways!

How do middle-school teachers around the world maintain their grip on sanity and reality? I felt myself sliding down the slippery slope from just observing these French* kids flaunt their world-class insolence! But whatever your reaction to them, chances are "Class" will get to you just like running your fingernails along a blackboard!

Did you notice the asterisk on French* Kids? Surprisingly, this inner-city French classroom was a veritable rainbow coalition: Africans, Caribbean Franco-Africans, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, a couple Hispanics and Chinese. Oh yes, and even some Gauls, born and raised! My spoken French is decrepit, but my ear is still fairly well-tuned and a myriad of different accents were very easy to discern, a few of them rendered somewhat haltingly.!

Encountering harmony and a real-time teaching classroom dynamic under these conditions pose a daunting challenge, to say the least. The problem resides in that 9th graders around the world are keenly aware of who REALLY is in control in the classroom.... They are!

More often than not, their classroom comportment is an unabated and blatant non-stop provocation of whoever is teaching them. But God forbid should that teacher lapse into a single moment of normal human reaction to such constant torment! The unspoken undercurrent that is dissolving the foundations of education around the world is only too self-evident in this "Class". Just a few accusatory words from any student could instantly vaporize the career of any teacher!

Francois, the real-life teacher exhibiting patience that would make Job look bi-polar in comparison, manages to defy expectation and give us an unprecedented surprise ending; apparently there IS something that most students still fear! Recommended to all teachers and anyone interested in the teaching process! 9*********

ENJOY! / DISFRUTELA!

I really enjoyed this film; however, I will disclose I thought about 10 minutes could be shaved off as a whole. The documentary style feel to the film aided not only the intimacy of looking into the classroom, but also into the lives of the students and teachers. It was refreshing to see "the human" side of a teacher portrayed--one that is fallible, not always saying the right thing despite trying to do the right thing...which is often what all people struggle with. Also, I liked that the film focused primarily on the episodes within the school rather than drifting into a melodramatic cliché of teenage angst or stereotypical conflicts. The Class is a nice balance of glimpsing into the world of teachers and their students.

At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, two movies were able to give viewers a vivid glimpse of the very real social context they dealt with. One was the Italian crime drama Gomorra, based on a non-fiction bestseller about the Camorra's dealings. The other, which received the coveted Palme d'Or (although Gomorra is a tad more riveting), is Laurent Cantet's The Class (the original French title translates as Between the Walls), which some described as the new Dead Poets Society for obvious reasons. The comparison is legitimate but a bit weak, mostly because The Class focuses less on the Greeek tragedy structure typical of school-set dramas. Instead, it gives an incredibly accurate idea of what really goes on in an average school class.

Cantet's film is based on the eponymous book by François Bégaudeau, a former teacher who decided to inaugurate his writing career with a memoir of sorts recounting his experiences in a middle school in a Parisian suburb. Not surprisingly, when word of a cinematic adaptation came out, Bégaudeau wanted to be involved, contributing to the screenplay and taking on the lead role, virtually playing himself.

Well, not really: there's a degree of fiction in his character, at least in the fact that his last name is Marin. Everything else is spot-on, though: he gets along with his colleagues, has an intelligent teaching plan and is generally considered a good French teacher. Still, that doesn't mean there aren't problems in the class, especially when most of the 13-year old kids in there are foreign (Moroccan, Chinese, etc.). Situations range from a new student struggling to fit in to troublemakers refusing to pay attention, and it looks like some of them might not make it to the end of the academic year.

The magic of The Class is of course that it doesn't feel like a movie, but like something real, tangible - a slice of life, if you may. This is because Cantet prepared the film by selecting thousands of real students for the various parts and then going through a year-long improvisation exercise with those who made it to the final cut. In this case, though, "improvised" doesn't equal loads of swearing like in Judd Apatow's body of work (even if some of the lingo used by the kids is on the stronger side), but things people say and think when they're going through that delicate period of their life. There isn't really a point in talking about performances, save for the adults, who are nonetheless teachers in real life. These people, particularly the young ones, aren't acting, they're living. And that is a beautiful thing to behold.

It is said that movies and life do occasionally merge. Few examples are closer to the truth than The Class: it's not a biopic, it's not a documentary. It's a lesson.

Greetings again from the darkness. Not a film in the traditional sense and not a documentary by true definition, it mixes the two into an absorbing, addictive 128 minutes.

Over the years, I have often questioned the educational system and why both teachers and students are so frustrated. Here we get an inside look at both sides and it still leaves me wondering "why?". Why do otherwise intelligent people commit to becoming teachers? Why do we insist on teaching formats that are miserable for both teacher and student? Why do so many parents blame the school and so few take an active, supportive role? This is the story of Francois Begaudeau, who also wrote the book upon which director Laurent Cantet's film is based.

Begaudeau is a junior high teacher in a working class, multi-ethnic Paris school where the teachers have resigned themselves to the fact that most of the students just don't care to learn. We get an incredible amount of classroom time showing how the melting pot of cultures has so much to offer, yet seems impossible to tap into.

Also fascinating are the teacher meetings and discussions that occur away from the students. We see no joy in these teachers and most seem just beaten down. The film offers no solutions, it strictly acts as a peek inside the institution.

While we are left to our own accord to pick sides or dream of alternatives, I continue to ask the same "why" questions over and over.