The Class (2008)

Filmmaking in the wake of documenting a stage play with never-ending dialogue by neglecting the visuals, giving me a stretch of two-hours beyond tiresome.Nevertheless director Laurent Cantent handles a mass of youngsters and his self-fulfilling leading man, French writer/actor François Bégaudeau, well.While watching this unfortunate enough on my laptop instead in a theater, it seems that the film is not given any further exposure of what I have already been known from my own youth at a German high school.Coverage has been handled with a lack of a cinematographic enchantments in an all-too staggering hand-held documentary manner, which on one side gives me the feeling of being part of "The Class". On the other side mainly shot into the actors faces without sharing frequent physical parts as hands and feet of a desperately needed visualization of body languages.My overall feelings on the Palme D'Or Winning Picture from 2008 brings the Cannes festival's jury surrounded by actor Sean Penn, acting as president, in a tight position of just consuming a picture, in an otherwise respectively-speaking weak competition, instead of spiritual digesting it.In further doubt, the 2008 jury chose the most conservative film imaginable, benefiting a picture, which representing realities instead of interpreting, translating it into a proper cinematic vision.Furthermore the fact of being non-stop interior does not benefit "The Class", it makes the film claustrophobic, suffocating and arresting where is not really a need of showing school as a prison than a chance to live, what might have been an extraordinary cinematic experience with participations of Avantgardistic cinematographers such as Anthony Dod Mantle or Bruno Delbonnel.Here at running time marker 1h09mins30sec, the interest for the bulk of introducing characters stand still, even more with being just reduced to spectators of continuous accidents than being in demand to take a stand of controversy on current education in a self-determined so-considered civilized society.At times an Extreme-Close-Up (ECU) of pupils' hands and feet come through the editorial. But mainly Director Laurent Cantent loses himself in talking heads with shying away from essential human conflicts, how one finds his place in life or at least fight for his conviction."The Class" being an adaptation of the leading actor's novel with the same name, François Bégaudeau shares arguably no further insides of a spine, which should question of not challenge the on-going evolution on how education of constantly emerging next generation in the 21st century.So the picture originally title "Entre les murs" - between walls - concludes with a lecture on violent behavior between the educated and the educators, which stands still as anti-civilized action, putting everyone involved and participating in danger. Needless to say that mother and son get chased away, expelled from school.In comparison to an end of the 1968er student generation with the force of institutionalizing confrontations, this picture sees young adults as hopelessly sedated human beings, feelings reduced to love and being loved on pseudo-shifts; and furthermore taught to be part of a society as a single connecting wheel of a gigantic money-ordering clockwork machinery.In 2017, the time when I am reviewing "The Class" declares a whole generation (born between 1981 and 1997) on brakes, close to stagnation with no emotional evolution towards what came before.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

Entre les murs is not the first film about a school of children of different ethnicities, with different and often problematic backgrounds, but - compared to many others - it is definitely more realistic, without events forming top new stories. But this realism creates a certain aridity and protraction, and unless you are teacher or student, you would probably get upset about the tolerance and teaching level, and begin to ponder on and over degeneration of both education and youth. In the film, we see perhaps a couple of pupils longing for knowledge, most of them have trivial and/or limited interests, are over-sensitive about their ethnicity, tend to regard common disagreements as racial implacability, etc. Even if it is a humdrum of schooling nowadays, I do not approve it, neither I have sympathy for those behaving badly and disturbing others. The staff seems too apathetic, focusing on solutions on paper rather than winnowing "good" out of "bad", and the goal of the entire seems to choose between bad and worse - better a kid in a classroom than on the streets.Well, the cast is pleasant, realistic, beginning with François Bégaudeau, a real-life French language and literature teacher in a middle school in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, and ending with all children who, as to me, seem older than their characters of 13-14 y.o. But still, the film is a kind of perpetuation, without dynamism and character development. As for a feature film, not my cup of tea, really.

In some respects this is Etre et Avoir both urbanized and upgraded from ecole to lycee; at yet another remove it's a latter-day Blackboard Jungle inasmuch as both titles feature multi-racial inner city schools where the pupils are more or less killing time before becoming old enough to leave. Evan Hunter based his novel on his own experience as a teacher at a vocational school in New York but he stopped short there, unlike the author of Between The Walls who not only penned a semi-autobiographical novel but adapted it for the screen and then played the lead who is, of course, more or less himself. Strangely enough there is less violence here (2008) than there was in Blackboard Jungle in 1955 which could, of course, be taken as an encouraging sign.The kids and the teaching staff are also real and the twelve month rehearsal period results in a documentary which has been polished to fictional standards. Definitely worth a look.

Entre Les Murs This movie won the Palme d'Or? This must be some mistake. The fact that this movie won a best feature film award makes the whole competition look remedial. If you're considering watching this movie, think twice. This was three hours of my life I will never get back. Talk about a waste of time. If you're looking for something to put you to sleep, you found the perfect thing! Entre Les Murs is nine months in the life of French teacher, M. Marin played by Francois Begaudeau. His goal is to help 13-15 year old, troubled students in the outskirts of Paris. This drama, directed by Laurent Cantent, was released in 2008 and in the same year won a Palme D'or. The movie shows the relationships and conflicts the students have with M. Marin and how they change. It shows whether or not the conflicts get resolved throughout the course of the movie. As I said in the previous paragraph, this movie centers on French teacher, M. Marin. He has been teaching for four years and is very experienced. I would describe him as tolerant of the students' terrible behavior but he is very unprofessional about many of the situations and conflicts that unfold in the movie. He instigates many of the arguments he gets into with his students and to make it worse, he escalates the situation by arguing back childishly. However, he cares about the students a lot and he really wants to help them be successful. He is very patient with their behavior and he never gives up on them, even when others do. The students in this movie have diverse nationalities such as Chinese, African and Caucasian. They are so disrespectful to M. Marin and always question every little thing he does or tries to teach them. The heated chain of events in this movie, at one point, led to violence. A key idea in this film that really caught my eye was the undeveloped plot. Even after the movie was over, I was still unaware of what I had just watched. I have no idea what the plot of the movie was or what the point of making this into a movie was. The first hour of this movie was very repetitive. All it consisted of was M. Marin teaching lessons. At one point I felt as if I was in class, just sitting there learning the lessons he was teaching. There was no climax or anything that was really exciting or good to look forward to while watching this movie. The ending was also very abrupt and just kind of ended strangely. Nothing about this movie stood out to me though, and I couldn't establish a concrete plot to this movie. You can probably already tell I was not a fan of this movie at all. This was a terrible movie and I have no idea what the producer was thinking when they decided to make this into a movie. This was previously a novel and to be honest it should've just stayed that way. This movie wasn't good because it had no story line, it had no plot and frankly it was just boring. It was boring because nothing interesting or exciting happened. The teacher taught some lessons and fought with the students. That's literally all that happened. Other than a few intense scenes of silence or violence, this movie was horrible. I struggled to even stay awake while watching it. I guess I would recommend this to French teenagers or people who like watching a teacher stand at a board and teach for an hour. I would definitely not recommend this to anyone and if you're reading this trust me when I say it, Do NOT watch this movie!​