Loading ...Screen Daily - Laurent Cantet’s wildly diverse oeuvre takes another turn with this absorbing improvised docu-drama revolving around teacher-pupil relationships in a school classroom and shot using real teachers and students from a Paris school over the course of a school year. The film focuses tightly on the dynamics and concerns of the classroom, never straying into details of the lives of kids or adults outside. Yet even though it takes place entirely “entre les murs”, it offers a rich microcosm of today’s multi-ethnic French population and fascinating insights into the complicated dilemmas and misunderstandings which teaching – and indeed learning – can entail.
The film demands that the viewer pay attention to long talkative sequences in the classroom which may be offputting to some, although the characters of the kids are so colourful as to render all these sequences humorous and lively. The universal themes of education could help sales outside France, and while it will never be more than an arthouse title, it could galvanize discussion in the press wherever it is released on the challenges of educating pupils from underprivileged immigrant backgrounds.
Cantet worked with co-screenwriter Robin Campillo and teacher Francois Begaudeau, who plays the teacher himself and whose book inspired the film, to come up with a backbone for the situations in the film, then used real 14 and 15 year-old students to create characters before improvising the classroom scenes. Although the events that happen are based on true-life incidents, the film is fiction, not documentary, and the schoolkids are acting roles… [Full Story]
