C’est lavie in this French school
School Life (M, 111 mins) Directed by Mehdi Idir, Grand Corps Malade Reviewed by ★★★★ In French with English subtitles.
Any hopes St Denis’ College des Francs/Moisins’ new deputy principal Samia Zibra (Zita Hanrot) had of the academic year getting off to a quiet start are dashed by lunchtime. A playground fight breaks out in the first recess and, by the time the final bell rings, there are already two students in detention.
Rowdiness, insubordination and tardiness abound, and then there’s her fellow teachers. If they aren’t complaining about their allocated classes, they’re engaging in inappropriate banter, letting discipline slide, or audibly taking the mickey out of their charges.
However, Zibra is determined to make a difference, whether it is finally calling out their sweary PE teacher on his ‘‘top competition sports jargon’’, persuading a female student that heels and a skirt aren’t the best for exercising in, or that throwing a carton at a history teacher isn’t appropriate classroom behaviour.
She can see the potential in some of her young people, she just wants to help them realise it.
‘‘Don’t treat adults and teachers as your friends,’’ she advises the gifted, but constantly in trouble, Yanis (Liam Pierron), before adding that ‘‘I know you’re better than this.’’
‘‘What if I’m not?’’ comes his confident, yet confused reply.
And it’s that mix of supreme self-confidence and deep-rooted uncertainty about the future that is at the heart of this crowdpleasing combination of sometimes uproarious comedy and searing social commentary.
It’s easy to see why writerdirectors Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade’s (aka Fabien Marsaud) movie was such a boxoffice smash in its native France.
It successfully marries the swagger, vibrancy and sometimes troubling relevance of Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables (albeit presenting the country’s ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ tensions in a gentler, friendlier manner) with the wit, colourful characters and semi-documentary style of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s brilliantly conceived and executed wedding farce C’est La Vie.
This feels like a French, cinematic version of noughties BBC dramedy Teachers, with its artistic flourishes (an early montage juxtaposes the students’ and staff’s early morning routines), running gags (the best one involving ‘‘ The Simpsons Challenge’’, where teachers’ vie for the stupidest ‘‘punishment lines’’ they’ve made students write on the whiteboard) and rising tensions, as a year in the life of ‘‘low-life school, in a low-life hood, in a low-life town’’, where ‘‘all the crazies are put into one class’’, unfolds.
If at times things threaten to veer into Dangerous Minds territory, the movie simply embraces it by playing Stevie Wonder’s original 1976 Pastime Paradise instead of Coolio’s Gangsta sample, where Herb Alpert’s instrumental classic Rise sets the initial tone and a student celebrates doubling their maths score ‘‘from 0 to 1’’.
It’s entertaining and enthralling from start to finish.