It's my time of year to take in the best foreign language movies of the last twelve months and Entre Les Murs (renamed, rather than translated, as The Class) is one of the best.
The movie is based on François Bégaudeau's memoir of a year teaching in a Parisian secondary school. The school is in an immigrant area and the students are a mixed bunch of both genders spanning most of the globe's ethnicities and all of the globe's enthusiasms for learning, ie some want to and some don't. Monsieur Bégaudeau's task as teacher Mr Marin -is to try and translate French classical language education into something that seems relevant to 21st century disaffected youth. It's an interesting movie, fictional yet based on facts, mostly improvised by the young cast, and shot like a fly-on-the-wall documentary using mobile high-definition cameras, yet staged. How to present Voltaire and The Enlightenment to street-wise fourteen year olds whose parents are threatened with expulsion from the country or whose personal failure may result in repatriation by the parents who are supposed to be on their side?
How to talk to parents whose cultural and language divide is an abyss between them and the teacher, and how to do it all in a spirit of equality, respect and intellectual rigour? It must ring a bell with teachers the world over they signed up to teach the subject they love and find themselves working instead as psychologists/counselors/social workers/disciplinarians and quasi probation officers to just try and keep everyone under control. It's not that the students are wicked or evil, just undisciplined and rude and one suspects generally abused by a careless world in which kids are two a penny amongst 6 billion plus people. The film follows a long and respected tradition of movies about the gifted teacher bringing out the best in a mixed bag of kids, but is more real, immediate and less schmaltzy than most of the genre.
I'm not a teacher - couldn't do it if you paid me a million $$$$ per year - so I'm not about to indulge in smart alec remarks about Mr Marin's methods, but I did feel that his attempts to be fair with his students and to treat them as equals might have been a bit misplaced and that some heavy handedness and distance might have been better if he actually wanted to implant facts. Funnily enough I am writing this review after reading an article online about how 'self esteem' education in the UK is leading to a generation of narcissistic children who are becoming unteachable and whose parents refuse to accept that their children are anything less than perfect.
Narcissism doesn't seem to be the problem for most of Mr Marin's class. They possess more a brittle and occasionally touching defensiveness and an inability to grasp why a classical education has any relevance to their lives. And who can blame them? But I came away from this movie with a feeling which I have often felt before - here where I live in the USA and have put two children through the public education system - that we are producing whole generations of over-confident under-achievers.
The young cast of The Class are fabulous. Apparently all pulled from similar circumstances to those they portray, the script was largely 'workshopped' prior to shooting. The knowledge that there are youngsters out there who can be taken from real life to achieve performances of this caliber cheers me up immensely and makes me think there is hope for the world. Gripping movie Go see.
The movie is based on François Bégaudeau's memoir of a year teaching in a Parisian secondary school. The school is in an immigrant area and the students are a mixed bunch of both genders spanning most of the globe's ethnicities and all of the globe's enthusiasms for learning, ie some want to and some don't. Monsieur Bégaudeau's task as teacher Mr Marin -is to try and translate French classical language education into something that seems relevant to 21st century disaffected youth. It's an interesting movie, fictional yet based on facts, mostly improvised by the young cast, and shot like a fly-on-the-wall documentary using mobile high-definition cameras, yet staged. How to present Voltaire and The Enlightenment to street-wise fourteen year olds whose parents are threatened with expulsion from the country or whose personal failure may result in repatriation by the parents who are supposed to be on their side?
How to talk to parents whose cultural and language divide is an abyss between them and the teacher, and how to do it all in a spirit of equality, respect and intellectual rigour? It must ring a bell with teachers the world over they signed up to teach the subject they love and find themselves working instead as psychologists/counselors/social workers/disciplinarians and quasi probation officers to just try and keep everyone under control. It's not that the students are wicked or evil, just undisciplined and rude and one suspects generally abused by a careless world in which kids are two a penny amongst 6 billion plus people. The film follows a long and respected tradition of movies about the gifted teacher bringing out the best in a mixed bag of kids, but is more real, immediate and less schmaltzy than most of the genre.
I'm not a teacher - couldn't do it if you paid me a million $$$$ per year - so I'm not about to indulge in smart alec remarks about Mr Marin's methods, but I did feel that his attempts to be fair with his students and to treat them as equals might have been a bit misplaced and that some heavy handedness and distance might have been better if he actually wanted to implant facts. Funnily enough I am writing this review after reading an article online about how 'self esteem' education in the UK is leading to a generation of narcissistic children who are becoming unteachable and whose parents refuse to accept that their children are anything less than perfect.
Narcissism doesn't seem to be the problem for most of Mr Marin's class. They possess more a brittle and occasionally touching defensiveness and an inability to grasp why a classical education has any relevance to their lives. And who can blame them? But I came away from this movie with a feeling which I have often felt before - here where I live in the USA and have put two children through the public education system - that we are producing whole generations of over-confident under-achievers.
The young cast of The Class are fabulous. Apparently all pulled from similar circumstances to those they portray, the script was largely 'workshopped' prior to shooting. The knowledge that there are youngsters out there who can be taken from real life to achieve performances of this caliber cheers me up immensely and makes me think there is hope for the world. Gripping movie Go see.