Who’s In It: François Bégaudeau
The Basics: In a tough Parisian neighborhood more culturally representative of modern France than most French people would like to acknowledge, a teacher who isn’t exactly Mr. Chips has to navigate through the choppy waters of a school year with a classroom full of kids who mostly just want to be left alone. In other words it’s as close to reality as you’re going to get from fiction.
What’s The Deal: The Dangerous Minds genre comes prepackaged with a template that involves the teacher working tirelessly to inspire their students to greatness, often with some unusual project that everyone gets on board for, one that teaches everyone more about life and friendship. And they’re always based on a self-aggrandizing memoir written by the inspiring teacher in question. This one, too, is based on an autobiographical story by the man who actually stars here as the teacher, but because this movie takes place in France everyone just accepts reality as it is, no one gets a hug at the end, the kids finish up the year still disliking authority figures on principle and the teacher goes off to smoke. Now the question for you, the potential audience, is, how much time do you want to spend with a bunch of mouthy, sullen, awful 14-year-olds? If you answered 130 minutes then you’ll enjoy this awesome movie that refuses to tell you how to feel.
Keeping It Real: François Bégaudeau, who stars as Monsieur Marin, wrote the novel on which this is based. He’s a teacher in Paris, so he’s playing a fictionalized version of himself. The other teachers in the movie are played by real teachers and the students are played by kids from a school in the neighborhood where the movie’s set. Even more unusual is that it was shot over the course of a full school year. So basically it’s like they just took homeroom period every day for a school year and shot a movie instead of sitting around copying each other’s test answers.
The Real Moral Of The Movie For Any Adult Who’s In Contact With Actual Teenagers: Do not use their slang. It’ll trip you up every single time and make you look like an idiot. Here, in one of the loose, almost-a-plot storylines, it happens with disastrous, cringe-inducing results for the teacher. If you ever needed a painful example to show all your 40-year-old buddies who’ve decided it’s cool to use words like “totes,” this is it.
Take That, Oscars: From critically admired director Laurent Cantet, this movie won last year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.