Sun, 22 November 2009
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Picturenose's James Drew takes a look at this year's Palme D'Or winner - a subtle, engrossing evocation of Parisian school life.Entre les murs
The clear favourite to take the top prize at Cannes (and it duly lived up to expectations, scooping the Palme D’Or), Laurent Cantet’s seminal study of ‘the blackboard jungle’ (which fully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Richard’s Brooks 1955 work, Robert Mulligan’s Up the Down Staircase (1967) and James Clavell’s To Sir, With Love (1967)) features former teacher François Bégaudeau (who also wrote the screenplay from his own autobiography) as himself during a school year spent with a class of 14-year-olds, trying to impart lessons in French and life.
The mixed ethnicity of the neighbourhood where the school is located (the 20th arrondissement, home to immigrants since the 19th century and which also has Paris’s biggest Chinatown) is well represented in the daily cultural melting pot ‘between the walls’ of the classroom - François must contend not only with teenage insecurities, reluctance to learn and truculence, but also with the rebelliousness, agression even, of one of his most difficult pupils, Malian troublemaker Souleymane (Franck Keïta). As a backdrop, power struggles and bickering in the staff room are also part of the daily grind - but the children must come first, right?
Cantet’s hand-held, documentary style approach works very well in the environment, helped enormously by the naturalistic dialogue/argot that is the back-and-forth between teacher and pupils. Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani) and friend Khoumba (Rachel Régulier) stand out - both have a relationship with François that veers between agression, defiance and respect borne of their need to be given direction, while his own relationship with the other teachers has a verisimilitude rarely seen on film.
This handy guide from Expertise in Labour Mobility includes how to write a CV, application procedure, interview dos and don'ts, Belgian management culture.
Belgium’s first alternative directory assistance services - available through the shortcode 14-14 - can now be accessed on the internet.
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