Cast: François Begaudeau

Director: Laurent Cantet

Screenplay: Laurent Cantet

Running time: 2 hrs 8 mins

Genre: Foreign Film/Drama



CRITIQUE:


At the mention of French Palme d’Or winner Entre Les Murs and its premise, it can possibly empty an entire movie-house filled with cinéphiles and hardcore critics. Classroom drama only welcomes clichés with open arms. Only that the Palme d’Or was no fluke; and The Class jettisons every single sight of cliché. The outcome is a mesmerising, maddening, often-electrifying piece of cinema, a classroom drama like no other. There is nary a rose-tinted histrionic of Dead Poets Society here, but rather the rawness of modern European film in the vein of Gomorrah with a Parisian classroom as the setting to which forces repel, like two pieces of sandpaper rubbed against each other. The grittiness lie within both the intelligently structured dialogues, the interplay between teacher and students, and its documentary machinations of its camera. Where modern filmmaking relies on authenticity and realism, hand-held movements are employed to bolster its edgy feel, as though we’re watching real life unfold before our eyes. There are no heroes here; in this classroom situated in the rough Parisian suburbs, constituting multi-ethnic students of modern France, issues of racism, sexuality, class division, violence and humanity are touched upon through the eclectic yet gripping classroom discussions. François Begaudeau, former teacher, delivers a richly-nuanced performance as the French teacher, by no means perfect yet sincerely in bringing discipline in an entirely unleashed, hellish behaviour of his students. The latter, meanwhile, constitute the vignettes of the diverse culture and life where educational system rarely understands. Life is what happens in a classroom, but most of the times, teachers rarely understand what happens in life outside the classroom. Never depicting the exterior settings, it sidesteps soap opera and handles the issues that it stokes with intelligence, wit and flair. Laurent Cantet, along with his cast of superb youngsters, surely beams wide with that Palme d’Or.



VERDICT:

A classroom drama like no other, Entre Les Murs is the antithesis of most high-school-set Hollywood films: there is no linear plot, no easy answers and absent of any neat endings. And it’s all the more remarkable for that.



RATING: A