I need to think more–and have more time to try to compose some kind of response to–Laurent Cantet’s The Class, but it is the best film I’ve seen in some while, even following my great experience the other evening with Happy-Go-Lucky. I could have watched the film for hours; it felt like we’d fallen into a world, and in its short running time the film worked the kind of wondrous challenging representation of the experience of public education undertaken over the course of the whole of season 4 in “The Wire.” (I actually have no idea how long the film was, as I felt both lost in it for some while and surprised/saddened as it came to a too-fast close.)
The first great film I’ve seen this year. And I guess actually better than anything I saw last year, to boot.
How did you watch it? I have been waiting for it to release on DVD but it is still lodged in my queue with an “unknown” release date.
It’s out in the Twin Cities; a colleague called me late in the day to see if I’d be up for a later show, and I almost said no, thinking I’d wait on a dvd — but, boy, if it shows up in your respective towns, get out and see it!
You saw this! Damn you!
Sorry–Tim P called me last night. But I’d see it again….
No worries. I’ll see it at some point. Your review makes me want to see it soon. I think Nicola would like it; perhaps I can talk her into going.
I don’t see it showing up here, but you might be interested to know, Mike, that Oberlin College just bought the Apollo (or rather, some college subsidiary headed up by Danny DeVito and other Oberlin-related folk with money, bought it). Once it is renovated they will start adding some more limited release movies, let the cinema studies program use it during the day, etc. In a year or two we might actually get movies like ‘The Class’ here in town.
Jeff–I am CERTAIN Nicola would like it.
Chris–lucky bastard. Pat Day was talking about wanting to buy the Apollo years ago when I was there. Meanwhile, here at HU, we’ve got crap locations for showing films (lousy projectors in big stadium lecture halls with fans constantly humming overhead–and that’s the GOOD room), and we’re struggling to get a film studies major together. Maybe send DeVito our way….
I bet Kimi would see this. She still may be pissed at us though. WDYT? I’m still giggling my butt off by the way. Jeff, WAN2TLK?
Oh, John.
What are we going to talk about John? I’m always in need of conversation (he says on a Friday night as his wife sleeps away her day’s work and he is, once again, left alone in front of the computer while watching basketball wondering how in the hell things got so out of line).
Who’s Kimi?
John?
Two, perhaps-more-substantive things:
I did some reading, and was amazed to discover that a) the lead (Francois Begaudeau) wrote the autobiographical novel from which he adapted this script and b) the students were all signed on and then workshopped their roles for a long stretch before filming, in a largely improvisational form, using three cameras to capture.
And I mention all this for point one: the film feels impressionistic, building rich but nuanced ebbs and flows of conflict and resolution before leading to one, sort-of central closing action — yet it is astonishingly tight and well-edited. I was certain upon leaving that it had to be a helluva script, the film felt so dense yet so precise in its structure. Apparently not. No wonder it felt so lived. (I was reminded throughout of the best of Altman. And, no, Arnab, that doesn’t mean you should avoid this.)
Point two is similar, but moving from narrative structure to its thematic content — the film captures the ambiguous ins and outs, back and forth, force and resistance of the classroom in ways that I don’t think have ever been captured. I don’t teach this age group, nor these sorts of students, but I was startled by many moments of recognition: that grimace of oh-shit failure as you find yourself speaking lines that aren’t you, responsive to some elements of crisis or confusion in the room; the burst of adrenaline when you step out of your plan, meet resistance and even anger head-on but non-confrontationally, and you feel the room–and that resistant student in particular–fall back in to the groove with you, the “lesson” reframed and (DAMN!) working. And, yes, also those moments where you realize you’re working in a system, that you’re not even the dupe but actually the deputized enforcer of that system… that your greatest hopes to make some kind of difference are stymied by the great inert bulwark of a system designed to produce simple conformity.
I loved that the film had no villains–that everyone was well-intentioned, even likable–and yet various wrongs were perpetrated, and the film kept its cold steely gaze, revealing those wrongs.
After Reynolds left me dangling (stab, twist), my wife consented to accompany me to the cinema. She teaches in an inner-city school (83% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch; at least 25% are considered legally homeless) and was very curious. She also speaks fluent French having spent four years teaching at a French immersion school in the district (a school which proved to be too white for her tastes).
The Class (the French title is literally translated as Between the Walls, which is more apt, I think) is a great film—a dazzling, high stakes, rapid-fire, chess match between François Bégaudeau (playing a version of himself) and his middle-school students—but it bugged the hell out of me. In fact, it made me very angry—appalled even—by the antiquated, condescending institution that appears to be the French public school system. Shot with hand-held cameras and utilizing tightly composed close-ups throughout, the film rarely gives the viewer a chance to breathe, and, as Reynolds noted, its 129 minutes fly by far too quickly. It may frustrate, but it is enormously entertaining and provokes much thought and debate.
The film chronicles a year in the life of this teacher and his lower-middle-class students as he pokes, taunts and cajoles them in an effort to engage their intellect and curiosity, yet when they strike back his expressions veer toward the wounded puppy (Bégaudeau helped adapt his best-selling memoir about his experiences as an inner-city teacher for the big screen). Arrogant, self-righteous and a bit prissy (well, privileged is probably a better adjective though his students accuse him of being gay), Bégaudeau is not a very good teacher. Indeed, he seems to both resist and submit to the system in which he operates. He expects absolute loyalty and respect without the need of actually earning it (very French says my wife), but he is also subjectively permissive, creating a classroom environment that serves as a highly problematic site for the performance of the kids’ “authentic†selves (as long, of course, as they follow the rules). Such mixed messages shake up the room and, on occasion, spill out into uncontrollable moments of chaos. In one such moment Bégaudeau loses his cool and calls two females students putasses (a slang term for whore or slut translated as “skanks†in the subtitles). This leads to a messy brawl that provides the film with something approaching a third act.
Like a Rorschach Test the film is smart in that it never explicitly condemns or celebrates its characters. Though I would argue The Class plants just enough clues to suggest it is critiquing a crumbling, failing system (and, writ large, a nation that still has not come to terms with the legacy of its colonial past), the spectators are given full agency to make up their own minds about the material conditions enacted on the screen. As much as I might argue that my anger at the institutional system on display is fully justified, I can imagine another viewer out there feeling as if the institution is far too lenient and should slam the hammer down on these kids more often.
In the end, the film seems to be about language as a conduit to power and control. It is no surprise that Bégaudeau is a French teacher (and there are no surprises at the end of the film when the students share what they have learned over the past year). Bégaudeau battles with the kids to make sure they learn how to speak and write properly while also negotiating his way through their often confusing, polyglot patois (the classroom contains a mix of French natives, north and west Africans, and Caribbean students). In one extremely frustrating scene a fourteen-year-old Mali immigrant faces a disciplinary committee with his mother, but the woman, who doesn’t speak French, is not supplied with a translator, and it is hard not to burn with rage as the French bureaucratic system pile drives through a proudly stubborn woman as her embarrassed, indignant son internally collapses in front of the camera.
One caveat: a pivotal moment in the final stretch rings a bit false. One of the more rebellious students announces she has read Plato’s Republic as a riposte to her teacher’s earlier slight against her (she’s one of the skanks). But Plato argued against democracy, advocating a system of government controlled by a team of philosopher-oligarchs. The irony here is either too subtle or completely ignored as one could argue the school is already operating under Plato’s dictates, and Bégaudeau is making a mockery of this small republic by inflaming his student’s passions through creative self-expression. This may be a small point, but it felt odd to me.
Nice reading, throughout. I too found the Plato bit odd, but the irony you note seemed in keeping with the Rorschachian quality you aptly named earlier; on the one hand, her having read it satisfies that idealized notion of the kids *can* do it for themselves, if their skills were only recognized, AND the idealized notion that, no, she’s lost without a guide.
Either way the system is, you’re right, clearly depicted as failing everyone — even the ineffectual principal/administrator means well, but so precisely follows the dictates of convention and precedent that you have trouble imagining any real engagement with the practical realities of their educational context.
My favorite scene is the (annual?) committee meeting to assess student progress. The administrators are there, along with all the teachers and two student reps. Names of students are mentioned, and the teachers try to work through their respective experiences. The student reps are giggling–clearly annoying all of the adults, but no one ever says a thing. And yet also clearly these students *are* listening, are engaging–they just rely upon different codes of communication. It was a model of the failures of a kind of loose liberal ideal: giving students a “voice” but not giving them tools or advice to speak, and not listening to them when they do speak. Maybe not really hearing them–again, it might be that these adults just do not really get what else they could be doing.
You are harder on M. Marin (Begaudeau) than me, but it’s fair: he is arrogant. I guess I’d emphasize his intentions, his ability to recognize the limits of the system–even as I would lament his cowardice when faced with a challenge to his own privilege in that system.
And that last paragraph is where the film’s educational context and my own seem most acutely coincident… I am constantly frustrated by the lack of attention to pedagogy in higher ed, and the reproduction of various methods of privilege (honors programs, “merit” scholarships, the rallying cry of academic freedom misused in many debates). And my own failures to push on that privilege hard enough…
Third paragraph (comment #14): you took the words right out of Nicola’s mouth (nearly verbatim).
I wanted to write about that student progress committee scene as well. The lip service given to “transparency” was outrageous (the students sitting in on the meeting, but when they actually share what they have heard with their peers–as if 14-year-olds would not–it is seen as a major breach of decorum). Yes, they listen in their own way, and one student actually acknowledges that a struggling student had improved his grades (to no avail), but the fact that two represenative students are allowed to hear the teachers talk about other students’ educational and behavioral transgressions goes against everything the American system stands for (in fact, it is against the law in America to do what these folks are doing up on the screen). It made me wonder if such practices actually exist.
Isn’t higher education all about privilege in America? And private colleges and universities are even more about privilege, right? Certainly we are more inclusive than most other countries in the “first world” (I think about my brother-in-law’s experience as a student at York University and the entire education system in England). I’m not sure how you will knock down that wall?
Well the first thing to say, is just to concur that this is a dazzling, wonderful film and so far, for me, easily the best I’ve seen this year. The richness of the dialogue, the remarkable performances from Begaudeau and the students, and the intimacy of the camera work, all combined to make every moment riveting.
I guess I didn’t react to either the school system or the Marin character in the same way as Mike and Jeff. I’m not sure what the comparison is with, and any attempt to compare with the US runs into the purposefully decentralized and hence diverse educational experiences provided by the public schools. But what struck me was not the bureaucratic, crumbling nature of the system, but just how thoughtful and careful the teachers were. Real, nuanced discussions about the strengths, weaknesses and family backgrounds of students went on in both the annual progress meeting and in the various disciplinary meetings. You saw a rule-based approach represented by one teacher in particular, and one more sensitive to context represented by the Marin character. And the two repeatedly argue it out. For a highly centralized, even rigid educational system, there appeared to be a great deal of flexibility in application. My local public school allows no parental involvement in disciplinary decisions, and sanctions are far more automatic. In fact, any student from 6th grade up who is caught in any kind of physical altercation at school is transported to the city jail unless a parent can immediately be located to pick him/her up.
As for Begaudeau, he is the most conflicted character about the treatment of Souleymane, and in many ways the most supportive of him. He sees the potential to open up the creativity of the boy through his cell phone photos. He is the one arguing against sanction in the progress meeting (his remark that Souleymane is “limited” in scholastic ability — used against him by the student reps — was intended to head off disciplinary action). And he argues for understanding the consequences of expelling Souleymane rather than simply following the rules. We never know how he actually votes.
Honestly, I’d rather my kids were in that French public school than our local public school.
As for the student progress committee meeting, what are we meant to take away from it? It is not obvious that it is just paying lip service to student input. The student reps, after all, are portrayed as not taking the process seriously. Is that because they know their involvement is irrelevant, or because they are not particularly good reps? The one comment, made by Esmeralda, is about grades, when the issue being discussed is behavior, and nothing is said or implied that suggests their speaking up is a breach of decorum. We presumably have all had student reps sit in on job search discussions and other departmental and college issues, and some are better and more effective than others. I’m not sure we can conclude that the process is a sham based on the information at hand.
But, all that said, I think this reinforces Jeff’s comment in paragraph #4 of comment 13: the brilliance of this film is its ambiguity. It leaves plenty of room to disagree about the motivations of the teachers and the system within which they operate. As Mike notes, it has no villains, and we can all put ourselves in the shoes of the teachers, the students, and even the administrators as they navigate a very messy educational project.
i am quite surprised, even shocked — not bad shock, like outrage, just shocked — by jeff’s and nicola’s reaction to this film. i gather the climate in nicola’s school is quite respectful and kind, but i’d be hard pressed to believe that american public schools are uniformly schools in which students are treated with dignity and respect. simon and just saw this and found it a quite painful experience, because we watched it as teachers who stand in front of classrooms and grapple with issues of authority and power every day. i also taught in italian middle schools for several years — one of them a rural school in the mountains — and i found that the class dynamics represented in this film cut really close to the bone.
but even now that i teach college, well, those dynamics are still there. the push on the part of the students, the resistance on your part; the resistance on the part of the students, the push on your part. and the enforcement of rules. and the acceptance or declining of students’ request. this awful power to encourage and promote, or cause people to lose scholarships. the power to tell people, “no, that’s not it, do it again.â€
back to american vs. french schools. i found this school, the school of The Class remarkably gentle. i agree with chris that there is some great sweetness in the teachers’ meetings, their civilized exchanges, their concerted, mild-mannered, even humble efforts to find solutions. i think of american public schools (what i know of them in general, and clearly, probably, the main point to be made is that EVERY SCHOOL OF EVERY COUNTRY IS DIFFERENT FROM EVERY OTHER SCHOOL OF ANY COUNTRY) in terms of policing (often literal) and serious disciplining. tucked in shirts, uniforms (i hate uniforms), systematic methods of disciplining (three warnings you’re out), security, violence, detention (detention?! detention is kidnapping), etc.
in this school the students and the teachers talk. and then the students and the teachers talk to each other, respectively, in their own groups. and there is a fair amount of agonizing over decisions on the part of marin.
i am part of the second generation of students who benefited from the school reforms that took place in italy and france (and maybe other countries; i don’t know) in the 70s, when high school were occupied. it was then that the institution of class reps was started, though we didn’t get to stay in meetings in which individual kids were discussed by name. nicola finds this outrageous, and as a knee jerk response i do too, but let’s think about this. imagine a family: the members sit around the table and discuss jane’s recent debacle at school, the pot mom found in joanie’s room, the stacked beer cans young kevin keeps under his bed. i remember those times well. they were heady times. we earned a right to school assemblies, to input in faculty meetings, to a presence of students and parents in the school’s highest administrative organ. it was an effort to democratize schools and, i think, it failed disastrously.
in any case, it’s not like students (kids) don’t know what is going on: who gets punished, who is struggling, who is doing well, who is shining, who is flunking. of course they know.
i think those times were times in which the students said, “enough with the infantilization.†let us have a seat at the table. let us make the decisions too. it’s our education.
i don’t see anything wrong with this.
i decry the assumption that the adult in charge is always wiser, more qualified to make decisions, more mature.
which is exactly, i think, the focus of this film. i love the scenes towards the end in which the kids come right out and say, “if you can say x why can’t we?” the kids know things the teachers don’t know. they, for instance, know that souleymane’s father will send souleymaye’s back to mali. when khoumba communicates this to marin, marin dismisses her, then proceeds to communicate the same piece of information to the faculty. why dismiss khoumba?
i think this film tries to address the issue of savvy kids locked in a system that, in spite of its efforts and changes, still fails to recognize the great burdens they bear (rage, frustration, discrimination, impoverished families), their strides toward adulthood. when souleymane is expelled and the class proceeds happily to its conclusion and everyone is smiling, we know that something important has been lost, that an experiment has failed.
one more point. don’t know if you guys have seen the extras, but the actor/writer who plays marin and laurent cantet both explicitly see marin as a young idealistic teachers. so when you (jeff? anyone else?) talk about his arrogance, well, maybe you are not reading the character correctly. cultural mistranslation? i don’t know french, but italian is not big on pleasantries, on “good point!” said after EVERYTHING the students say, crappy points included. it’s just not written in the code of the language. when i first arrived here i was ELATED by all the good questions and good points i was told i made. it took me ages to realize that “good question!” can also mean, “beats me.” maybe french works similarly.
english is big on positive reinforcement. french may not be. italian is not. english rarely says, “not true.” it says, “well, yes, but,” especially in pedagogical environments. marin treats the students with benign sarcasm but americans are not fond of sarcasm. maybe you guys found it offensive because you don’t like it? the kids are sassy with him back, and he takes it like a good sport.
still, i don’t like marin. i think he believes himself more democratic that he is, and that he ultimately unveils the inherent contradiction that lies at the core of education, upbringing, parenting, teaching. as much as you try to make you wards your peers, they are not, nor will they ever be.
I can’t speak for Nicola and Jeff, but your last paragraph gets at what I saw in the teacher and in the scene where faculty and students are talking:
“still, i don’t like marin. i think he believes himself more democratic that he is, and that he ultimately unveils the inherent contradiction that lies at the core of education, upbringing, parenting, teaching. as much as you try to make you wards your peers, they are not, nor will they ever be.”
But rather than focusing on “peers” I would focus on the endemic misreading that goes on. The inherent contradiction, yes, but I think it’s less that he (and the school) try to treat kids like adults than that they say, hey, we want your voice, and then they do not really listen or hear it.
I *do* indeed see Marin as idealistic, and I do indeed appreciate what potential is established by the nature of the French (or this particular French school’s) process allowing student representation on such decisions. What bothered me has an analogue here in the States’ higher ed — the teachers bring the students in, but when the students behave like the teenagers they are, they scold them. They don’t question the students’ (let alone their own) different motivations and behavioral training, they don’t try to interpret in the language of students/students’ behavior. They assume the students are wasting their “privilege.” And this attitude pervades even the very, very empathetic portrait of Marin — and it’s what cuts to the bone for me (I love the way you named that, Gio) — he has the best intentions and ideals, yet he remains (somewhat? maybe even somewhat intentionally?) blind to the way he perpetuates the inequities he so clearly wants to abolish.
I don’t simply sit back and blame him: I see this as emblematic of most education, again as you lay out so well Gio. I took the film to be an illustration of such bedeviling problems. I certainly agree that the film displays an enormous sympathy for the difficulties and the ideals, but also an incisive insight about the failings, of the teachers (and students, and families) depicted.
And, as I mentioned earlier, higher ed is full of complaints about student motivation, about student behaviors — such grousing drives me batty. “My students don’t read what’s assigned.” Yes. You lecture on the subject, right? Why read–you’ll lay it all out for them anyway. The test, or essay, will be easily passed with regurgitations of things said in class. “My students have the most reductive identity politics…” Yes. They are EIGHTEEN. They live in America. How surprising. I think student behaviors — the ones we could all name from our own classes, or the ones we see in the film — are eminently reasonable and learned practices for the educational systems in which students have been acculturated. That is what I find so damned frustrating and compelling about the film: its (cutting) portrait of someone who I would like to be on my best days, still full of blind spots about his (and others’) behavior as the system merrily rolls along….
love everything you say, mike, even as i do find myself occasionally complaining about students, as i’m sure they complain about me. hey, i’m eighteen too, and all other ages.
and therein lies the problem. that whatever moral authority we teachers claim to have over the students is not something we can enforce, because it’s either you have earned it or you haven’t. and if you have earned it, the students and everyone else will feel it. in other words, there is no intrinsic right to greater respect a teacher has over students. and if are you an insensitive ass and your students stonewall you, you are in trouble, because you have a curriculum to finish, a class to conduct, your own personal anxieties to deal with, and you will end up using authority instead of allowing dialogue. if you allowed dialogue you wouldn’t be an ass in the first place.
maybe there should be a text called “what do students want?” maybe there is. i am splendidly unread in pedagogical theory.
okay, love this paragraph:
let me follow up with something else i’ve been thinking about and that’s intimately connected with mike’s points. the original film was called “inside the walls” and that seems important (“the class,” by the way, is a great translation i think). the walled-in world of school (any school) is arbitrarily removed from the real world the students (and the faculty!) live in. the students come to class with all sort of learned wisdom, which, however, is entirely dismissed and devalued in school. this happens in the film over and over (even though there are moments in which it doesn’t, like when souleymane’s pictures are praised and posted). it’s particularly jarring when the non-francophone mother of souleymane tries to convey to the professors what a great kid souleymane is, and the teachers — and i’m echoing you mike — don’t listen. it’s not a problem of literal translation; there’s a lot of cultural translation missing there, and i’m not just talking about mali culture vs. french culture, even though that’s an element too.
in this school populated with african and caribbean kids, all the teachers are white. if souleymane get sent back to mali, well, that’s life isn’t it?
the cultural gaps are too many to mention, but, and i think i’m echoing mike here, there is no effort to bridge them. the effort is already ideologically compromised. i mean, this is cantet, right? he’s talking about race, class, imperialism, language, privilege.
the last scene, when the good students regurgitate the useless shit they have learned, or think they have learned, and the blunt, maybe not so good students say that have learned nothing, is heartbreaking. (pointedly, no one seems to have learned anything from french classes!) i don’t think i learned much in school, myself. i learned something, but not much.
it’s a bit uncomfortable to me, knowing how most of the actors are not, in fact, actors — including and especially marin — to think that these very real people might well have been taken for a ride. did cantet mean to expose the hegemonic structure of the school — or education in general? if so, the dvd extras will make you cringe with the lovely chemistry between cantet and the guy who plays marin, françois bégaudeau. cuz i honestly do not think he realizes that he’s portraying his own failure.
i think this would be an amazing film to teach. wish i could teach it right now.
Gosh, it’s funny that this thread was suddenly brought to life again. We’re in the second day of a French film festival here, and I was asked to introduce this film, which was screened tonight. Had I known we even HAD a thread on Entre les murs I would have stolen from each and every one of you!
I thought I’d post my introduction here, warts and all. Had I seen this film sooner (I only watched it today, hours before I was to introduce it) I would have been deeply engaged in the discussion. So forgive me if what follows seems a bit lame, or if I seem blind to the deeper issues of pedagogy, class and race. It is and I am. If there’s anything here that just repeats what has already been covered by you all, then I am flattered.
Two years ago, the College of Charleston hosted an interdisciplinary conference, called “Teachers, Teaching, and the Movies.†I was involved from the beginning in organizing the conference, and one of the earliest conversations I had with a colleague of mine who was also organizing the conference was about how poorly Hollywood depicted what actually happens in the classroom. I was watching an interview with the director of Entre les Murs, Laurent Cantet–who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this film–and I was struck by what he says about this problem: “the school and the cinema make a rather odd couple; in other words, the cinema will often propose the school as a set, but there are very few films about the school.” Let me play grammar teacher here for a second. “About†is a preposition. All prepositions are abstract relations, but the preposition “about†is especially abstract. The phrase “films about school†gives us an indeterminate spatial relation between “film†and “school.†This is quite apt since most films about schools are just that: about, around, above, outside, the actual school, the actual work of teaching, the actual work of learning. Okay, I’m done lecturing. Let me just assure you that Entre les murs is not a film about a school. It’s a film that’s in school. Entre les murs means “between the walls.†It’s interesting that the English title is “The Class,†which I think is much too abstract. Like American filmmakers, American distributors just don’t get it.
Tonight we will be between the walls of a racially diverse classroom in Dolto high school. The class is grammar, the teacher is Francois Marin, played by Francois Bégaudeau who wrote the semi-autobiographical book upon which the film is based. The film is shot in a loose, quasi-documentary style, with Francois and his students largely improvising before three unobtrusive hand-held cameras. What is remarkable is that the feel of the film, its integrity or sincerity, is never disrupted by what, in scriptwriter-speak, is the catalyst, the pinch, the resolution. Imagine a Hollywood film about a white teacher in a racially diverse classroom. White teacher, armed with good intentions and sound pedagogy, struggles with his students’ constant disruptions, insolence, and poor, even violent behavior. While his colleagues, who lack sympathy or patience, tell him to give up, he refuses. Maybe with the help of his students, he will discover how his own prejudices about race and class are preventing him from “reaching” them. In the end, not only will our teacher “reach” his students, he will, thanks to their help, learn a little something about himself along the way. Sound good? Sound familiar? Don’t expect it in tonight’s film. Expect, instead, scenes as real and as true as this, seemingly innocuous one. It is late in the film. Francois is sitting in the school cafeteria, smoking. There is only one other person with him–the cook cleaning up after everybody. She reminds him smoking is not allowed and Francois says, “I know but since I was alone…†But Francois is not alone, unless he sees the cafeteria worker as nobody, personne. Moments such as this make Entre les murs one of the most honest films about race, class, and education. And it is as enjoyable and as thought-provoking as it is honest. Why do we have so few films like Entre les murs? Laurent Cantet says “everyone knows school is a place of work, and we know that work doesn’t interest anyone.†In other words, school is inherently uncinematic—or more accurately, most filmmakers have neither the interest nor the talent to find the cinematic in school. Cantet has both.
Nice!
The only thing would make it better is if you told me you did it in Nutty Professor garb, with the voice, and the schwabin.
second mike: nice! two particularly nice points: the cafeteria worker who is no-one and the fact that this is a film about work. cantet seems to like films about work. i do, too. also, john, gee, you are all grown up!