Entre les Murs

Rating: 80%

(www.rottentomatoes.com)

Also known as:

Class

Year:

2008

Country:

Predominant Genre:

Drama

Director:

Best Performances:

Plot:

Teacher navigates a year with his racially-mixed students from a tough neighborhood.

Themes:

Personal change | Self-expression | Compassion | Totalitarianism | White supremacy | Ethical Politics

Similar To (in Plot, Theme or Style):

To Sir with Love

Review Format:

DVD

[Class]

Interesting dissection of Western issues of ethnicity, class, sex/gender and culture seen against the background of an inner-city school.

Here, compulsory education exists to control the poor that the White bourgeoisie fear – as a form of collective punishment for being different. This spills over into the condescending manner in which Person of Color and women of all cultures are treated.

Yet the children are not stupid and can see that their education provides them with little of value. They also know that the pedagogic institution within which they work possesses little real meaning to the way in which they live their lives. This is why education for most people is useless since it largely imparts bourgeois values they do not and cannot share, rather than actually being a means of self-improvement.

Thus, no matter how good the teachers are, the system is fatally flawed and the teachers are ultimately shown as having feet of clay precisely because of this. Not treating adolescents as potential adults provides them with little incentive to behave as such; necessitating the introduction of draconian disciplinary codes. These latter would not be needed if the education were neither compulsory nor teacher centred nor lacking in a proper balance between keeping order and education.

The conflict between the typical teenage desire for self-definition and the teachers’ ultimate desire for control is also well shown. The performers are precocious, spontaneous and natural; being the main reason to watch. They are all clearly defined characters in their own right and never give the impression that they are acting in a movie which, to the extent that they are appearing in a semi documentary, they are not.

Although exceptionally good at stating the problem in clear terms, this movie proposes no solutions.

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Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.