European Films

After the exotic locales and 1970s setting of Vers le Sud (Heading South), French filmmaker Laurent Cantet returns to the contemporary social and work-related issues of his earlier features for his 2008 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Entre les murs (The Class). Again an austere but acutely observed drama with a quasi-documentary style, Entre les murs impresses with its veracious tone and nuanced characterisations, though when late into the proceedings Cantet tries to impose a more rigid order on the until then Altmanesque portrait of banlieue-school dynamics, its narrow focus on a particular incident diminishes the force of the film as a whole. After winning the Palme d’Or, distribution in all European countries is as good as guaranteed.

 

Cantet’s cameras in Entre les murs – which literally translates as "between the walls" – never leave the school premises. In this sense the film sticks closely to the Aristotelian idea of unity of place, though the film explicitly rejects Aristotle’s ideas on the unity of time – it takes place over a school year rather than a day – and action, with Aristotle pleading for a clear cause-and-effect relationship with a beginning, middle and end where Cantet, until the closing reels at least, prefers to focus on group dynamics in a learning environment.

 

The film’s story, based on a novel by François Bégaudeau that was heavily influenced by his own experiences as a teacher, looks at a class of 14-year-olds during a school year, with a teacher (played by Bégaudeau himself) trying to impart French and life lessons on a class that reflects the mixed ethnicity of the neighbourhood where the school is located: the twentieth arrondissement (most famous for the Père Lachaise Cemetery and which has been a home to immigrants since the 19th century; it also houses the French capital’s biggest Chinatown).

 

The class includes Malian troublemaker Souleymane (Franck Keïta); Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani) and her sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy Khoumba (Rachel Régulier); Wei (Wei Huang), whose Chinese parents are illegal immigrants, and the apparently calm newcomer Carl (Carl Nanor), who was expelled from his previous school. Cantet also looks at François’ relationship with the other teachers, with a verisimilitude that was also on display in the primary school-set story strand in Ruben Östlund’s Swedish Un certain regard film De ofrivilliga (Involuntary).

 

All characters, not least François himself, are flawed, and all are on a continuous learning curve – some just have a steeper curve ahead of them than others. A throwaway scene of not even a minute long illustrates this perfectly. François, thinking he is alone in the school cafeteria, lights up a cigarette. A cleaning lady passes and tells him its forbidden to smoke there. "I know," François says, "I just figured… since I am alone". While he says it, he realises how ridiculous his defence sounds, but what really makes the scene work is the fact that Cantet doesn’t linger on it. It comes off as just a small moment in the life of a flawed teacher who desperately needed a cigarette.

 

Though in Cantet’s previous features dialogue and silence were equally important building blocks, Entre les murs is filled with almost wall-to-wall chatter, though unlike in Abdellatif Kechiche’s secondary school-set drama L’esquive (Games of Love and Chance), the chatter almost always consists of substance as well as noise (and is occasionally very funny). Words and grammar are not only taught but also used as weapon in verbal sparring matches. A detail that might be lost on foreign audiences occurs when Esmeralda accuses her teacher of "charrier," a word that means both to kid someone and to go too far, a crucial double entendre that Esmeralda tries to exploit but which was lost in the English subtitles caught in Cannes.

 

Working from Begaudeau’s book and experience as well as countless workshops with the students, the conversations, banter and occasional outbursts of rage all ring true and are captured by regular Cantet cinematographer Pierre Milon with ease (the entire film was filmed with three cameras rolling at the same time). Like in Cantet’s Ressources humaines (Human Resources), in which the factory workers where played by unemployed workers, the director here again successfully relies on untrained acting talent, while the slightly faded colour palette is in line with the look of Cantet’s previous films. The absence of a musical score of any kind further enhances the verité style.

 

The film is at its strongest when Cantet, Begaudeau and co-screenwriter and editor Robin Campillo concentrate on the general dynamics of groups in an educational environment, including the dynamics of the class as a whole, the teacher-class dynamics and the relationships between the teachers and between teachers and parents. When, towards the end, the film tries to impose a focus on one issue (involving one student and the disciplinary committee), it loses something of its own Altmanesque dynamics and becomes less interesting, though the final wrap-up – involving a round of questions on what the students have learnt during the year and an impromptu football match – is strong.

 

For the record, the young teens that appear in the film are all from the same school but, because of logistical reasons, the film was shot at another school.