Sweat at the Chalkface
Entre les Murs (The Class) (2008), Cert (UK) 15, 128 mins, Dir Laurent Cantet, Cast François Bégaudeau
Entre les Murs (The Class) is a film for teachers and for anyone who really wants to become one. I remember being on an INSET day and watching a video of a “satisfactory” (read, “inadequate”) lesson – but I would much rather we had watched this, it would’ve been far more instructive. The film is based on a semi-autobiographical book of the same name by François Bégaudeau, and he plays himself. It follows a year in an inner city school and deliberately lacks the traditional movie dynamics of even, say, Half Nelson. Bégaudeau makes an ambivalent central character: a good teacher, his idealism is waned (or perhaps was never even there), sometimes he slips up with troubling consequences. There is a depressing momentum and the final scenes are quite heart-breaking for their quiet realism. It is millennia away from the mawkish, “My Captain, my Captain,” of Dead Poet’s Society. As much as any teacher might wish to be the sort of individual who captures the hearts of his or her students, this is what it is really like. Personalities clash almost accidentally but inevitably. There is no grand narrative, no huge social point; rather there is a deliberate this-is-how-it-is approach. Teaching is exhausting; teenagers make brilliant company in the classroom but they bring with them the labyrinthine complexities of an awakening brain out of pace with an awakening body. Add to this the profound, intractable difficulties of inner city poverty, immigration, low aspiration and you have a mix that is at once hugely enriching and also hugely dispiriting. The film’s success is mostly due to the kids – as any classroom’s success is ultimately due to the kids. It really is hard to grasp that this is not a documentary, but a bunch of gifted young actors. They provide most of the laughs for the audience again, neatly capturing what it’s like at the chalkface. Here the care the director and team applied to slowly craft this classroom really comes across. Perhaps too ponderous and a little overlong. It also seems to be a little missold as the story of an inspirational teacher who takes (too many) risks. It is nothing of the sort. But it still has a warm and gentle heart that has more accurately captured what a real classroom is like than any teacher-class film I’ve seen. If you want to go in to teaching, this is the film you should watch first.
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