Entre les murs (Collection Folio (Gallimard))

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The only thing I don't like is that on the film poster I'm making a face that I hate - it's bizarre to see yourself look so big. Even if there are problems between the professor and his students, by the end, they are all playing football together in the playground. This dialogue consists in sharing the pieces of truth that every single individual, students and teachers alike, have gathered in their lives.

At the time the French President Nicolas Sarkozy sparked accusations of racism by condemning the largely immigrant rioters as "scum". Fictionalizing that Esmeralda had read Plato's Republic was idiotic, and her explanation was atrocious. When I ask if deliberately misbehaving in the film has made them nicer pupils in real life, they laugh. One of the most valuable and relevant life lessons that my University has taught me is the purpose of education itself. I think it must be difficult to teach me because I like to wind people up, but I'm a lot calmer now since the film.When he chalks up examples of good and bad grammar on the blackboard, they ask pointedly why he uses Anglo-Saxon names such as "Bill" and not, say, "Rachid". Like the rest of the film, this scene is natural and unforced and effortlessly persuasive, but it is the non-dramatic sequences that I somehow found the most gripping. Cantet's final tableau shots of the empty classroom, like a deserted battlefield, made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

François himself is coldly furious at the girls' indiscretion and accuses them in class of behaving like "pétasses" - "skanks" - crucially losing his cool and compromising his authority. Francois Begaudeau's memoir/novel about teaching in inner city Paris provides the basis for The Class, which inventively combines the best of the documentary and classic drama genres.His sole moment of privacy is glimpsed at the very beginning of the film: having a coffee before gearing himself up for the fray. The way it would work is Laurent would give me a theme [for the scene] and then I would improvise the dialogue. I do not want to spoil any of the later developments, but will only say that the film doesn’t offer any easy solution or happy end. In spite of this, François insists on the importance of them understanding the imperfect subjunctive — and I think this passage actually reflects one of the central ideas of the film: education gives you a choice .

Still, that doesn't mean there aren't problems in the class, especially when most of the 13-year old kids in there are foreign (Moroccan, Chinese, etc. So, out of the corner of our eyes, we see the girl who absent-mindedly twirls a loop of hair round her finger, the boy who balances backwards in his chair against the wall and the unexplained fits of giggles and whispers. For the 5th part of our series about teachers in movies, I wanted to explore another French film, the 2008 film “ Entre les murs ” / “The Class”.

The teacher comes to rely on seduction, pressure and sanction without avoiding personal confrontation with some of his pupils. At a teachers' conference to decide final placings, François defends Souleymane but his efforts are undermined by the two student representatives at the meeting, Esmeralda and Louise, who behave in a very childish manner. He eventually finds himself facing his angry class and trying to convince them that the word has a much more innocent connotation than they believe, and this scene takes place not in Marin's home turf of the classroom, but outside in the schoolyard; the balance of power has shifted. Overall, The Class is a remarkable film that proves beyond a doubt that teaching is the hardest job on the planet. Meirieu is concerned about the reading that can be made of the film, which, by showing the difficulties and the explosive situation that emerges, suggests that there is no alternative or which would reinforces authoritarianism and anti-pedagogism.

In François's class, Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani) and Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) predominate: they are smart but moody, idle and subversive, and just savvy enough about François's liberal scruples to wind him up. In a further deliberate blurring of the lines between truth and invention, Bégaudeau plays the teacher in the film. This is because Cantet prepared the film by selecting thousands of real students for the various parts and then going through a year-long improvisation exercise with those who made it to the final cut. This story builds quietly, almost invisibly, through the film, and culminates in the disciplinary hearing in which Souleymane's non-French-speaking mother is present and in which the gloweringly silent and defiant pupil must translate her passionate and heartbreaking defence of him as a good boy.It is a semi-autobiographical account of Bégaudeau's experiences as a literature teacher in an inner city middle school in Paris. You may not need to use the French imperfect subjunctive every day, but being able to recognise it and potentially use it means you are better equipped when tackling unseen texts or when confronted with formal French.