The English title - The Teacher - is a serious deviation from the original French: Les grandes esprits. Esprit can mean mind or spirit. The great mind will be open to differences in spirit. The title shifts the emphasis from the students to the teacher, from the fringe immigrant class to the privileged white man, from the great spirits to the conventional disciplinarian.
In the posh Paris school where we meet him, M. Foucault is equally generous complimenting the good students and insulting the majority. He carries that insulting manner to his new school, which at first sight looks like a prison but turns out to be an open, generally comfortable institution despite its lower standards and achievement. Teachers even let their classes have tea parties.
These marginalized kids are the "great spirits" of the title, wild, energetic, undisciplined, yet detached by their inability to escape their expectation of inevitable failure.
The chief lesson in the film is the well-regarded teacher's conversion from his assumption of unassailable superiority to accepting his responsibility to help his disadvantaged charges succeed. He stops judging them to help them. When he leaves his highly regarded Paris school for the disdained suburb he opens himself to new growth as a teacher and as a human. Of course, "Foucault" alludes to the seminal thinker in the Left's current cultural theory.
The film's Foucault gradually mends his ways to get through to his new class. He countenances their cheating and alters his teaching strategy and class subjects to give his students at least a feeling of success. Once he breaks their expectation of failure they have a chance to succeed.
Seydou, whom Foucault initially calls stupid, develops a new self-respect, a new interest, a new courage. He ultimately eschews the gang life to return to school.
Foucault's success with Seydou is at least in part due to his taking a personal interest in him beyond the classroom. He advises him how to impress his romantic interest Maya, then intervenes to reverse the boy's expulsion. This turns his most antagonistic pupil into a friend. In perhaps the film's most touching moment, Seydou sits beside Foucault after the choir performance, each bemoaning his own romantic failure.
Foucault's strategy alienates some of his more conventional - and self-concerned - colleagues, who think he is courting cheap popularity by his generous grading. Seydou's expulsion is presumably caused by his antipathetic maths teacher, who resents his girl-friend Chloe's friendship with Foucault.
Foucault is given an interesting background. Even the successful teacher still moves in the shadow of his father, a very famous author who may be "the TV guy" a student cites. There's a chill in the father's signing his book to his son. Foucault's sister is an international figure developing an artists' residence in Tokyo. So the teacher's reputation and his command of his classroom may still fall short of his family's status.
Foucault apparently has no personal life. He is clearly out of his element at his new colleagues' party. He seems to be courting the Ministry woman when he suggests more experienced teachers be assigned to the suburbs. He mistakes her lunch invitation to be a personal date and is disappointed when it turns out to be a business meeting - at which he finds himself mired in the one-year school transfer.
His romantic hopes are dashed again when Chloe leaves with her lover for Canada. The result is to define him totally as the teacher. With heroic selflessness he has learned to serve and to liberate the great spirits of his underprivileged students.
The film has an interesting political underpinning. In his focus on proper French grammar, the field trip to Versailles, the teaching of Victor Hugo, Foucault and the film staunchly advocate the promotion of traditional French culture. Foucault has no interest in examining or advancing the immigrants' own cultural background. His and the film's assumption is that immigrants to France have to become French, have to adopt their host culture, and not try to import and advance their own instead.
The other side of the current cultural division is represented by the violent gang of expelled youth Seydou is tempted to join but decides to leave. In this insistence upon preserving their own national culture France presents a strong model for contemporary Europe as its massive immigration challenges their cultural norms. This point is what makes this film especially pertinent today.
Add a Review
-
Movies about school in difficult suburbs is becoming quite a trend in French cinema. This one has its moments but does not level some already made.
Its originality came from the set-up of the story: here we follow a teacher that is part of the privileged, highly selected "grandes écoles" (French specific system where selected students work hard to prepare competitive exams to enter the best renowned school - at international level). This system goes with inflexibility, hard work, high expectation and bad grades. The transition from the top - always judged as unsatisfaying - to the disadvantaged secondary school should be a shock, both in level and in student behaviour and interest. I however think it could have been better used in the story in the teacher discovery period, even if we had to face the discipline issues and the "awakening" transition.
Finally, this change of world is also used to - and the title is there to point it out -question ourselves what a great mind is, and how school can help a youth to become one. -
Kirpianuscus6 June 2018As teacher, I saw this real good film as a too deja vu. the differences , the adaptation, the challenges, the sentimental problems, the discover of students step by step, the vulnerability of the position of front to the class, the social problems and the options. for the others could be a nice film. and that is not a wrong impression. the humor, the spices of French cinema are good points. and, sure, the performances. but for me, it remains a smart, maybe too unrealistic in few scenes, portrait of the life of a teacher.