ENTRE LES MURS ("The Class")

I saw it a while back, this little French film, but failed to put it on record. My friend Hot Pocket recently joined the WGA and gets a couple perks like film screenings free of charge--cha-ching (that's the sound of my wallet smiling). And she knew this film, which won the 2008 Palme d'Or at Cannes, would be just the right one for me, Francophile Extraordinaire.

ENTRE LES MURS, literally "Between the Walls" (though the wide-release title is "The Class"), displays the relationship between a group of students in a low-performing high school and their teacher. It centralises on the lives they live "between the walls" of the classroom--and the elements of these lives that are only visible between the lines, to the hyper-observant, in the words unsaid. The film's message is universally relevant, because it shares a compendium of stories that play out daily in schools across France and the world. Education is in peril, this film seems to say--but so are the people who impart it.

In watching ENTRE LES MURS, you can't help but note how the educational system is simultaneously corrosive and constructive. No one is ever 100% right--not the students, not the teachers--and neither is the system itself, neither in design nor in implementation. Eventually, society pays for it. In one way, it frustrated me, because it makes that aspirational fight for educational equality seem so worthless. "These kids will never make it." Both the instructors in the movie and I at different moments thought it. And then I would feel guilty. You see, I mentor at a middle school in a dodgy part of Fire City...so shouldn't I think every kid has the potential to "make it"? And if I don't...am I a hypocrite?

M.Marin, our central character, played by the man who wrote the book upon which this film is based, seems to ponder the same. And I think watching him struggle to handle these bad students--and then watching him handle them badly--might make people take note that teaching, working in education and working with kids is all hard stuff. Whether they're in the dodgy end of town or much further up the street, who knows if they'll make it? It's a crap shoot. The class in this film, played so brilliantly by a host of non-actors (all the students in the film are actual students at the high school depicted--and in fact, the majority of parents played themselves, too), is a crap shoot, too. Are they acting in just one more long-winded, slice-of-life French film...or are they going to reverberate off the walls and slowly effect the world?

plot: Pubescent students are a handful.
thought: At least they can act.
in five: 3.5/5

learn a little (in french): http://www.entrelesmurs-lefilm.fr/site/

learn a little (en anglais): http://www.sonyclassics.com/theclass/