I prefer the French title of Laurent Cantet's award-winning film, before its loose translation into English loses the essence of the story. Entre les Murs, or Between the Walls, is certainly a more interesting name than The Class, and it more descriptively denotes a great theme of this story: that of being trapped.
A balding, but still attractive 30-something year-old, Monsieur Marin (played by François Bégaudeau who scripted the film from his own novel) is once again stuck teaching twenty some odd adolescents in a poorly run public school on the outskirts of Paris…and his students are stuck right back.
Marin makes a concerted effort to teach his reluctant students. He battles the universal forces that derail students’ intellectual development, from the stumbling block of their petty in-class disputes to the hurdle of negligent parents. Marin’s fight is familiar to anyone who has been a student or teacher in such a class.
Aside from a few gold star moments – Marin gets Soulayman, the class’ top trouble-maker, to enjoy and excel at an assignment of creating a self-portrait – the teacher’s struggle, even to get through a simple poetry lesson without allowing the restless students literally to drive him up the cinderblock walls that surround him, is futile. Their time-wasting diversions and distrust of his teachings – one student asks why it is necessary for them to learn the pluperfect subjunctive case, making the precocious yet dead-on observation that speaking thus is “bourgeois” – are inexorable and exhausting.
The students’ struggle is just as tiring. Those who care to learn are impeded by the trouble-makers’ disruptions, and those who don’t fit in – such as Wei, the Asian student who has far from mastered spoken French – are ruthlessly ridiculed (we all remember how cruel high school kids are).
Essentially, the story boils down to whether or not Marin can save Soulayman. In spite of the few flickers of hope, such as the self-portrait success as mentioned above, Marin is unable to convince the rest of the faculty, plus the moronic head of school, that Soulayman could amount to something, or that this school could help him. Despite Marin’s sincere efforts, which admittedly flounder a bit in the final moments when his own job may be on the line if he persists in his defense of Soulayman, Marin cannot save his mischievous, misunderstood student from the inevitable – expulsion.
The film ends on a bittersweet note. The last scene shows Marin and other faculty playing soccer in the courtyard as the students cheer them on, seemingly having forgotten about Soulayman’s unfortunate departure. It’s the first and only time the school appears a community rather than an ostracizing jail cell. The last shot, with the children’s happy cheers faintly heard through the closed windows, zeroes in on the empty classroom, and the walls that bind it, reminding us of the all too familiar feeling of high school: entrapment.
Now showing at The Charles
