La journée de la jupe

excerpt, more at my location - Jean-Paul Lilienfeld has certainly ensured his new film Skirt Day will be talked about. Not only is it set in the hotbed of social issues that is Paris' outer regions, it also sees the return after a five year big-screen hiatus of Isabelle Adjani, one of the most celebrated actresses in the history of French cinema. Lilienfeld's film takes place in a lower class high school, and deals with some of the biggest issues of the day such as race, class and the French education system.

Full of emotion, hostility and dark humour, Skirt Day provides heart- pounding drama and astute social commentary in equal doses. All of this is capped off with a scintillating performance from Isabelle Adjani, who really does teach a lesson to any aspiring actresses.

Set in a teacher's worst nightmare: the unruly inner city high school, "Skirt Day" centers on the most likely teacher to trigger the defiance of students: a bourgeois European woman.

The film opens with a group of tough adolescents from minor ities, and an attentive eye will notice beyond the profanities that punctuate their exchanges that boys and girls walk separately. In these schools, boys have a one-dimensional way to label too promiscuous girls, which doesn't make girls less 'nuanced' than their masculine counterparts...

From this early sociological scanning, as a teacher myself, I felt I was in familiar territory. When Sonia Bergerac (the teacher played by Isabelle Adjani) shouted that it was 8:20 and they were late, the way the local joker (there's always one!) said "no, it's 19" was a spot-on on the level of lousy humor we have to endure on a daily basis. The film effectively captures the inconvenient and politically incorrect truths about these suburban schools but it's for small details like this one that the realism succeeds.

Then Sonia struggles to climb up the stairs, looking like she's dressed for a Champs-Elysees gala and her skirt hardly gets unnoticed by the boys. There's a level of sexual tension preceding the theater session in a sound-proof class (a vital plot element) and the coming aggravation is so obvious we just wait for the moment Sonia will reach her breaking point.

Meanwhile, a brief exposition allows us to have a glimpse on the students' profiles: you have the loudmouth girl, the secretive one, the silent kid whose black eye betrays his status as the local punching ball, you have the two delinquents: Mouss, a b.lack kid and Seb, his red-haired buddy and in that grenade-like atmosphere, poor Sonia who makes it a point of honor to teach them Molière. Such dedication is as admirable as the preposterousness to believe they would care.

Watching her trying to teach about the man who gave him his name to the very language they keep violating struck me as one of these lost causes the educational system mandates us to commit and the tension and confusion grow so rapidly that the gun that pops from Mouss' bag becomes a defensive weapon for Sonia before she turns it back to the owner. And chaos ensues. I guess if a film tells the story of a teacher who turns her classroom into hostages, it's better not to have her having premeditated the act and so she is just a victim of circumstances, realizing that with the gun on her hand, she finally earned the one thing she never could get with her students: attention, if not respect.

The gun becomes her own microphone and through it, she'll shout a number of improvised revendications to the Raid squad, including the establishment of a national "Skirt Day" where woman and girls will wear a skirt to stand against mis.ogyny. At that point, it's sad to observe that some environments are so hostile toward woman that it takes a gun to empower them, but the ends justify the means.

On the paper, this is one of hell of a promise that director Jean-Paul Lillienfeld manages to pull with enough competence to make the film a little close to "Dog Day Afternoon' with the same social commentary as the Golden Palm Winner "Entre les Murs". I thoroughly enjoyed the film because somehow in the way Bergerac addressed her students: mocking their manners, their mis.ogyny and the way they can't align sentences without using profanity, there's a teacher-fantasy behind.

Isabelle Adjani who won the Best Actress César for her performance displays a range of emotions that pans over anger, bewilderment and fits of madness that only someone put in similar situations can understand. I've never felt Adjani overacted because you can't master your emotions with a turbulent youth that acts over-the-top, however I wish the film would have allowed a few quieter moments here and there.

I have a hunch that Lillienfeld was so eager to tick many cases that he needed to insert more subplots than needed. I liked his idea of providing a backstory to the negotiator (Denis Polydades) and make him a well-meaning schmuck under hierarchical pressure from his superior (Yann Collette) to Nathalie Besançon who plays the Minister of Interior with a firm grip. Then "Skirt Day" tries to expand to other territories while maintaining its own grip on the educational system: the principal (a tad too comedic Jackie Berroyer) deplores that his hands are tied by the Ministry and his school is either a "dump" for bad students or a provider for other dumps, parents insist that their children are saints and other teachers pathetically fraternize with the students by playing it cool, going as far as incriminating Sonia, who seems to have a prejudice against some communities.

While precious to the film, these aspects force Lillenfeld to jump back and forth between the inside and outside, making the hostage situation a series of vignettes without a palpable fluidity, it's one angry episode after another. The characters are not caricatures but some situations are because we're not given time to try to approach the characters as human beings but just archetypes caught in a web of confusion and so there's a dangerous element of predictability that Lillienfeld seems particularly aware of.

I suspect that he tries to counteract it with the deliberately misleading opening shot and then with the late twist about Bergerac's identity, just like Sonny in "Dog Day Afternoon", in a way it reveals more interesting depths about her character but the way it's just thrown like without being further exploited seems a bit gratuitous. "Skirt Day" has guts and heart and humor but it lacks some good thirty minutes that could defuse tension and allow us to know or at least understand the protagonists a little more...

This is a very touching story, very well done on all levels. A high school theater teacher, suffers from the impolite attitude of her students, and their continuous disrespect. She finds herself with a gun she found with one of her students, and ends up with half of her class as hostages. Here starts the complexed relation between people there. A very important thing that you should know, is the estate of Arab people living in France, their social phobia, and their lack of integration, that led to very big issues lately. That's what this movie talks about. With a great scenario, full of surprises and unexpected events, Lilienfeld makes an emotional social thriller, discussing rights of women, immigrants, Muslims, teachers, respect, pedagogy... Adjani is great in this part, i see she deserves her Cesar, as for the entire cast, especially the teenagers, very convincing. Some "committed thriller movie" is not something we see everyday, so do not miss this good one!

i am french from pied noir origin. i am definitely touch by this movie. While some peoples might think, the film deals with too many different issues at once.first .Isabelle Adjanie, as usual, play with her tripe's, she play for her life, in this role of a french teacher, who lost the plot. we might think, as some reviews have express, there are concentrating on too many issues, but being from a french mother and Algerian father pied noir, i growth up in the city , as we call it in France, i growth up in the city, and when to a very similar school then the movie, the reason, this really strike a chord. the fact is, yes i did get racketed it, beating up, yes, peoples might choose to ignore or brush the issues the movies address, but i, who has been in the same city school, can assure the public, this movie strike a cord, simply due to the fact i have live every issues, ( except for the rape) address in the movie. this is a very honest and blunt account of what is going on in the poorest city state school! and yes i was in this type of school back in early 80's and the same problem were already present, one would have think, things would have improve, but sadly, today, my brother and my cousin being teacher, i can assure you, they will confirm, the situation did not get better but WORSE! Isabelle Adjanie doesn't act often, it was 6 years since she had made a movie, but Christ, when she take a role, she does not act, she live her part, like there is no tomorrow! With Camille Claudel, this movie top up the very long and incredible journey of an actress, who is probably the best actress we have in France.

Comedy turning into drama. The teacher confiscate a gun of a student and uses it to get them under control, until things go out of control. Not as bad as USA shootings though.