Sweat at the Chalkface

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Entre les Murs (The Class) (2008), Cert (UK) 15, 128 mins, Dir Laurent Cantet, Cast François Bégaudeau

Entre les Murs (The Class) is a film for teachers and for anyone who really wants to become one. I remember being on an INSET day and watching a video of a “satisfactory” (read, “inadequate”) lesson – but I would much rather we had watched this, it would’ve been far more instructive.

The film is based on a semi-autobiographical book of the same name by François Bégaudeau, and he plays himself. It follows a year in an inner city school and deliberately lacks the traditional movie dynamics of even, say, Half Nelson. Bégaudeau makes an ambivalent central character: a good teacher, his idealism is waned (or perhaps was never even there), sometimes he slips up with troubling consequences. There is a depressing momentum and the final scenes are quite heart-breaking for their quiet realism. It is millennia away from the mawkish, “My Captain, my Captain,” of Dead Poet’s Society. As much as any teacher might wish to be the sort of individual who captures the hearts of his or her students, this is what it is really like. Personalities clash almost accidentally but inevitably.

There is no grand narrative, no huge social point; rather there is a deliberate this-is-how-it-is approach. Teaching is exhausting; teenagers make brilliant company in the classroom but they bring with them the labyrinthine complexities of an awakening brain out of pace with an awakening body. Add to this the profound, intractable difficulties of inner city poverty, immigration, low aspiration and you have a mix that is at once hugely enriching and also hugely dispiriting.

The film’s success is mostly due to the kids – as any classroom’s success is ultimately due to the kids. It really is hard to grasp that this is not a documentary, but a bunch of gifted young actors. They provide most of the laughs for the audience again, neatly capturing what it’s like at the chalkface. Here the care the director and team applied to slowly craft this classroom really comes across.

Perhaps too ponderous and a little overlong. It also seems to be a little missold as the story of an inspirational teacher who takes (too many) risks. It is nothing of the sort. But it still has a warm and gentle heart that has more accurately captured what a real classroom is like than any teacher-class film I’ve seen. If you want to go in to teaching, this is the film you should watch first.

Blood in the Snow

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:08:00 +0000

Let The Right One In (2008), Cert (UK) 15, 114 mins, Dir Tomas Alfredson, Cast Henrik Dahl, Kare Hedebrant, Karin Bergquist, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Peter Carlberg

'Let The Right One Slip In' is a Morrissey song that reminds me of the letters people write to themselves when teenagers: “Let the right one in/ Let the old dreams die/ Let the wrong ones go…/ They cannot do what you want them to” Morrissey croons. We always betray ourselves in the end; we always forget how lonely it is for most of us as we grow up.

Let The Right One In, based on the novel of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist, tells the story of a desperately lonely twelve year old boy, Oskar, and his friendship with Eli, a tragic and sombre girl who has just moved in next door. Virtually everyone is alone in this film, especially when in the company of others – the only ones who aren’t are a bunch of nasty thugs that torment poor little Oskar.

The film is honest and matter-of-fact and manages to look like it’s a BBC documentary from the seventies; the grey hospital illuminated by dead lights is scarcely different to any of the other locations, least of all the drudgery of the woods in the snow. And whilst they may be in internal anguish, the world about them affords little privacy. There are windows everywhere and even the woods are too sparse to let you get away with a nighttime murder, a fact that gives the film a tragic momentum.

Eli is a vampire and turns up with an older man, Håkan, who has been killing boys to drain their blood for Eli. Yet the claustrophobic proximity of others means he repeatedly fails in his task leading to one of the film’s grizzly moments. The violence is generally described in the same honest, matter-of-fact way as the alienation that overwhelms the population, often with a certain degree of wryness.

The two central performances are excellent. Lina Leandersson as Eli is beguiling even underneath the make-up, CGI and over-dub. Her simple and uncomplicated performance provides a refreshing take on vampirism beyond the tired man/monster dualism at work in most vampire stories; despite a similar animating conceit, Buffy the Vampire Slayer this is not. She is unrepentantly a monster, which is continuous with the rest of her character. It gives the film the space to say far more interesting themes about love and loneliness, especially with Eli’s sexual ambiguity (she says repeatedly that she is “not a girl” and a bizarre shot of her getting change late in the film suggests that there is more to this statement than an admission of her diabolism).

Such ambiguities neatly play upon the treacherous boundaries between friendship and sexual feeling at the transition to adolescence; the violence stands for that dread of not being able to go back. Thresholds are crossed throughout and are signalled by the old piece of vampire lore that they need to be invited in first. When not invited Eli’s entire body bleeds furiously reinforcing the link between her violence and the crossing girls make when they become women. It returns us again to that Morrissey song and the necessary betrayal of ourselves we make when we are forced by our own bodies to leave childhood behind.

Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar is the elfin, almost albino, distinctly creepy centre of the story. Eli and Oskar first meet when Eli happens upon Oskar practising a revenge stabbing on a tree against his tormentors. We get the feeling that without Eli’s intervention there’s the possibility that Oskar might either bring about some Columbine-style massacre or else drowned by his internal dystopia. Again Lindqvist and the director, Alfredson, eschew any hint of dualism to explain Oskar: he is gentle, morbid, sweet and murderous in one complex bundle. His lips are constantly twitching as both a rabbit in the headlights and a creature tasting blood on the wind.

His ethereal, translucent quality – we see him repeatedly as a reflection in a window – contrasts markedly with Eli, who is dirty and smelly when she hasn’t eaten but wholesomely turned out when she had fed. There are moments of touching immaturity as Oskar cleans his teeth with his mum or dances about in the swimming pool unaware that his bullies have a terrible plan in mind for him. Oskar is at his warmest from far removed from civilization, at his father’s home in the middle of nowhere. But then a friend of his father turns up and Oskar is totally isolated again. It seems to be that his father is also deeply unhappy in the company of his friend, just as Lacke is alone when he’s with his wife or another resident in the estate is alone with all of his cats.

The film is not flawless, some moments – including a cat mauling and a spontaneous combustion – are poorly realised (bloody CGI again) and come across as a cackhanded way to shut down a potentially complicating subplot. These scenes feel a little out of step with the cerebral pace of the film. (Håkan’s fate has also been changed compared to the book to provide focus and maintain the movie’s singular trajectory.)

Yet for the most part the film is pitched exactly right. As the body count mounts it becomes clear that Eli must move one and, in so doing, Oskar should “Let the old dreams die/ Let the wrong ones go.” The ending is, in many ways, wholly expected but perhaps all the more satisfying. It is an ending that emerges from the Peter Pan imagery and themes that underscore the film. In closing moments we are reminded of the tribe of Lost Boys who choose a strange perpetual childhood, a tragic stasis.

And when at last it does
I'd say you were within your rights to bite
The right one and say, "What kept you so long?"
"What kept you so long?"

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