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.

François Bégaudeau plays the lead--a teacher who is in charge of a class of intercity kids. Some seem to want to learn, but the class discipline is so lacking that you wonder how any of them can learn--and, as you watch, this is probably true.

"The Class" was an interesting film but also quite a frustrating one for me to watch, as I never was sure of the exact purpose of the film. I am a retired teacher, so hold on tight.... While I found myself interested in what was happening in the class, I also felt that this was a case of a teacher with good intentions who was, at times, absolutely clueless. And, sadly, he seemed to be one of the only teachers in the school who cared about the kids. Talk about a recipe for hopelessness and failure. It was interesting that the same failed methods and discipline were going on here in "The Class" as I sometimes saw in the States--and some burnt out or well-meaning but poorly trained teachers. I saw the film as a GREAT movie to show teachers so that they could see where the school in the film was failing the kids and learn from their mistakes.

A few of the lousy techniques I noticed from the teacher in this one: Letting his class continually disrupt the lessons on irrelevant things. Instead of ignoring or redirecting, he let them disrupt and chaos often resulted.

Letting disruptive groups of kids sit together.

Engaging in arguments.

A few I noticed from the rest of the staff included: One old-timer teacher telling a new teacher which kids were GOOD and which were BAD--setting the kids up to meet these expectations.

A very punitive system. One teacher even argued that positive reinforcement ONLY should come in the distant future--when kids look back at their achievements. Punishment was all that seemed to matter and it's no wonder the kids were misbehaving.

Allowing student reps to sit in on disciplinary meetings and hear confidential information about other students. As you could see in the film, this was a very, very, very bad idea.

Providing no interpreter for the Malian parent. While she said she understood what was occurring, it seemed pretty obvious she didn't.

By the way, I did NOT understand the ending. It seemed magical--as if removing the one very disruptive kid suddenly made the other disruptive kids become angels. This seemed very simplistic. In fact, I really didn't understand the purpose of the film--unless it was to say pretty much all the teachers in the film were missing the mark. All in all, a pretty hopeless look at teaching but the film was interesting, that's for sure.

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!

Best movie I've seen since No Country For Old Men. And you won't hear these two titles mentioned together too often.

The greatest accomplishment was in re-creating, in naturalistic documentary style, well....a classroom. And although it's almost half a century since I participated in such an environment, it seems not an awful lot has changed (well, apart from the total disrespect shown by many of the children towards their mentor). They were all there, mouthy, loud, quiet, bright, stupid. And real, or so it appeared.

Dead Poets Society it ain't. Remarkably free from schmaltz, the film traces a reasonably undramatic class year, with its group dynamics, teacher cock ups, mutinies - pupils that is - with a very small sprinkling of what is being taught academically. The result should have been fairly prosaic and I suppose it was, but I was transfixed by the skill of the players the art of the director and the total ordinariness of the people being so brilliantly portrayed. A terrific achievement by all.

Whether you respond positively or negatively to The Class, it's hard to argue that it is authentic to a very great degree. This isn't some Hollywood pablum starring Sam Jackson or Hilary Swank or even Dangerous Minds. This is taken- and starring- from the horse's mouth, a teacher who taught in the more multi-ethnic areas of Paris and via Cantet's direction, and it involved me like few films about the educational system ever have. No little drama involving the students, or rather crucial for that matter, lack any significance for the audience because from the moment we enter the classroom with Mr. Marin the camera keeps an eye on the details. Nothing is left out that might make anyone, teacher or the variety of student, look less than human. No one comes out at the end of The Class looking like they've reached the top of the world, and no one's a real hero or villain. At worst (and it's a sad but very true little moment), one kid says simply to Mr. Marin at the end of the last class that nothing was really retained from the past nine months.

After seeing The Class it brought back so many memories of school; like the 400 Blows the Class reminds us how absolutely rotten it is to be a 13 to 15 year old school-kid, but unlike Truffaut's film this is about an institution and its functions right in the heart of the matter. The teacher in The Class, real life teacher François Bégaudeau, casts such a convincing portrait because he doesn't have to really "act" or try to pretend he's a great teacher. He just is. He cares about all of his students deeply, but he's also firm when he needs to and knows, for the most part, how to reach them without going too far or coddling. It's a fine line he needs to walk since the class, made up of an ethnic melting pot as the saying goes, is smart and intelligent, and at its best we see this class participating and really in the grip of stirring conversation, even when it's about something that Mr. Marin has to handle with tact like when a student asks bluntly if he's homosexual, or when he has to deal with a young black girl who is slagging in participating in class.

It's the kind of naturalistic film-making that works because it's a synergy of the personal, of what is very well known and felt and learned about this world, and how to observe it. Some might say it's a "talking heads" movie with a pretty basic style, but the direction is wise by never getting in the way. Seeing these kids faces, and seeing the dynamic of conversations go on behind the closed doors of the faculty (some of these conversations, sometimes heated or just intense, are amazing not because of conventional dramatic power of one-side-versus-another but because of the thought put into these people, how tough decisions have to be made under certain circumstances).

It's strongest as a character piece, but also as a minor revelation into the bittersweet lot of teaching in an area like the 3/4 in Paris. There's a student who is troublesome, doesn't do work, is disruptive, but Marin wants to try and reach him. Another complication occurs due to a blow-up against a couple of chatty girls who were the "class reps" at a faculty meeting, and it sets a small chain of events that emphasizes chiefly how untenable the situation is and at the same time why it shouldn't be. This most major chunk of the film, about the student's possible expulsion, is one thing that makes The Class become even more absorbing than before, but it should be pointed out that from scene to scene nothing is left to chance. The cinema verite approach makes things move emotionally but unsentimentally; nothing is left for us to see these characters as what they are, which makes it so rewarding and heartbreaking when "things" happen as they do in movies. At one point something seemingly minor is revealed- a Chinese student, learning French little by little, may lose her mother to deportation. Not minor, it's all apart of another school day. A+