Saw this at the Deckchair Cinema in Darwin with Asha. Under the stars, a crisp, gorgeous night, in the most uncomfortable deckchairs ever. Good thing we brough extra pillows. Still, it's not about the chairs -- this place is all atmosphere. Where else can you watch a movie and see weird bugs flying around, and hear noises behind your seat that could quite possibly be a possum? And where else can you watch a movie and eat chili and scalloped potatoes?A really fun night.
The movie? I enjoyed it. I found out later that the actors in the film are not actors at all but the real people in the life of the featured teacher. They all trained for a year to get up to scratch to act in what is sort of a documentary, sort of not. It's a fictionalisation of the real life of Francis Begaudeau, a teacher in France dealing with a range of students from a variety of backgrounds. He's the kind of Morgan Freeman-y teacher who wants to reach these kids in ways the school system doesn't often allow -- by being direct, by administering punishment based on case by case analysis of situations, by treating his kids as individuals rather than as a collective.
Good thing is, though, this is not like Lean on Me -- this is reality, or as close as a film like this can get without being a documentary, and so there are successes and there are failures. The happy endings you might expect don't necessarily come, and so the film reaches the truth about education and the education system -- only rarely will the teacher get through to everyone who needs getting through to. And it resists massive drama, too -- it's a slowly-told film that lets you in rather than dragging you through with any sort of melodrama. The story and the characters are fascinating enough.
A good film, an interesting experiment in style, and a thought-provoking story.
