I think there are as many French films about school as there are British ones, more perhaps. This one, by writer-director Thomas Lilti has Vincent Lacoste in the lead and features two other star performers in French cinema. François Cluzet is a now grizzled older teacher in a middle school which doesn’t seem to be placed in any specific town or city. In fact Lilti explains that he shot the school scenes in three different locations across Île-de-France. What is important in plot terms is that some of the teachers live some distance from the school and have to take train and bus journeys to get to work. That sounds rather like my experience of teaching in London. One of the travellers is the third star name on the cast list, Adèle Exarchopoulos.
The three star names certainly attracted me and I later realised that I had seen one of the director’s previous films which I enjoyed very much, Irreplaceable (Médecin de campagne France 2016) aka The Country Doctor in some anglophone territories. Thomas Lilti has a background as a doctor and he is, I assume, best known in France as the director of two features Hippocrates (2014) and Freshmen (2018) as well as the TV series Hippocrate (2018-2024), each of them dealing with medical students and what in the UK might be termed ‘junior doctors’. Cluzet and Lacoste appear in these ‘medical institutional’ films, as do others in the cast of A Real Job, and now we have Lilti’s attempt to create a similar kind of approach to teaching as a profession.
Lilti chose a more ‘anonymous’ setting to avoid issues around stereotypical plotlines and characterisation associated with inner-city schools, village schools in rural areas or élite schools. The school itself is described as a ‘middle school’ in some of the promotional material. My understanding is this means a collège for students 11 to 15 and most of the students we see are probably around 14. The film aims for realism and in the Press Notes Lilti tells us that he is trying to give us a sense of the environment in the school and the problems the teachers face. Rather than a conventional narrative the film seems to be more like a documentary following a group of teachers over a year (or perhaps just a term) – the device used is to start with the arrival of Benjamin (Vincent Lacoste) as a replacement/’substitute’ Maths teacher. Benjamin is actually a PhD student who needs the money and he isn’t a trained teacher. The first teacher he meets is Pierre (François Cluzet) who enters Ben’s first class because he hears the students’ raised voices and assuming that Ben is a new ‘supervisor’ (teaching assistant?) takes over and quietens the noise. Ben is embarrassed but later the two become friends. Ben later meets the other teachers whose stories will be interwoven over the course of the narrative. Sandrine (Louise Bergoin) is a single mother with a teenage son. She is an experienced teacher but she is struggling, partly because of her son’s behaviour but Meriem (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is roughly the same age as Ben and seems to be doing quite well. Fouad (William Lebghil) is another 30-something and he eventually offers Ben a room in his house (provided by the education authority I think) which will save Ben’s travelling. We do meet other teachers as well but the five introduced here carry most of the narrative. There is an element of realism in the depiction of the school, but for me it needs a little more of the texture of school life and of the teachers’ lives outside school.
Lilti argues that he wasn’t interested in exploring pedagogy (i.e teaching methodology and approach) in detail. As someone who taught both students and teachers and for whom ideas about a critical pedagogy are key to teaching I’m a little disappointed by this. On the other hand, my experience was several decades ago and it is interesting to see current teachers, both experienced and inexperienced, going online and finding YouTube tutorials on teaching specific topics. We do get a sequence in which a school inspector of some kind observes a lesson and then bluntly tells a teacher “you are boring your students”. It may be true but it could be phrased differently and the Inspector could be more helpful. This is the kind of thing that I think has been happening in English schools as well and it isn’t helpful. We do get to see the teachers as a group having some down-time together and also out on a school trip together. The film is listed as a comedy-drama in various places but I didn’t find it comic as such – perhaps a wry smile at times but not much more. We also get a little of the home life of a couple of characters. In the end though, I think Lilti feels compelled to include a sequence that appears in many other school-based films. A student misbehaves, a teacher may be partially to blame and the parents are called in to the school. A meeting of teachers and other representatives of different interests then decides on what steps might be taken, I was reminded of a similar sequence (but with distinctive differences in detail) in the German school-based film The Teachers Lounge (Germany 2023). In this German case it takes up almost the whole narrative but I think Lilti uses his shorter sequence just as another of the wearying procedures teachers must go through – how do we instil discipline in students in a fair and reasonable manner?
Overall this is a well-made film with good performances. If you aren’t a teacher and therefore forced to consider what you would do in each situation presented in this film, you may well enjoy the experience of watching it much more than I did. I think Lilti made a mistake in not exploring the ‘how to teach’ question in more detail. I guess I’m prejudiced but if you are going to allow untrained teachers into classrooms, you should really offer them some ‘in service training’. If you want to give the film a go it’s streaming/renting on Apple TV in the UK and probably in other territories. This was my last MFFF title of 2025 and overall it’s been an interesting selection. I’ll be back next year.
itp Global Film 