I watched another French film in a row (after ""Il y a Longtemps que Je T'aime" and parts of "Man On Wire"). "Entre Le Murs" (known in English as "the Class") was 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 it.
"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. The execution of director Laurent Cantet is excellent for the material he has.
This is another instance when I am sure a lot of the richness of the language interplay will be lost in the subtitled translations. How I wish I could have understood that intense discussion of French imperfect tenses, or that big debate in the schoolyard between Marin and his students about the word "petasses" (which was translated in the subtitles as "skanks").
I could imagine that a lot of people will find this film boring because of the two hour length, only set within the school grounds, with 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.
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