View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carleton College: Digital Commons Carleton College Carleton Digital Commons Faculty Work French and Francophone Studies 2009 Etre et parler: Being and Speaking French in Abdellatif Kechiches LEsquive and Laurent Cantets Entre les murs Dana Strand Carleton College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.carleton.edu/fren_faculty Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, and the French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Strand, Dana. "Etre et parler: Being and Speaking French in Abdellatif Kechiches LEsquive and Laurent Cantets Entre les murs." Studies in French Cinema 9.3 (2009): 259-273. Available at: https://doi.org/ 10.1386/sfc.9.3.259/1. Accessed via Faculty Work. French. Carleton Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.carleton.edu/fren_faculty/1 The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1386/sfc.9.3.259/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the French and Francophone Studies at Carleton Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Work by an authorized administrator of Carleton Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Studies in French Cinema Volume 9 Number 3 © 2009 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.9.3.259/1 Être et parler: Being and speaking French in Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive (2004) and Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (2008) Dana Strand Carleton College Abstract Keywords French film-makers have long recognized the primordial importance to the nation’s Kechiche ‘imagined community’ of the centralized public school system, which, since the Cantet early days of the Third Republic, has been viewed as a bulwark of Republican values. language In this essay, I discuss the ways in which two recent films, Abdellatif Kechiche’s education L’Esquive/The Dodge (2004) and Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs/The Class national identity (2008), interrogate the role French schools play in shaping national identity. Both Entre les murs films focus on language as a marker of difference as well as a point of tension, per- L’Esquive formance and potential subversion, by exploring the respective contrast between the aggressive street French of the respective films’ adolescent protagonists with the stultifying bureaucratic discourse of the inflexible educational system (in Entre les murs) and Marivaux’s elegant eighteenth century French (in L’Esquive). Accorded significant media attention for their portrayal of the experiences of school- aged youth, both films have thus contributed to the ongoing national debate about what it means ‘to speak, and to be, French’ (Doran 2007: 498). Michael Haneke’s 2005 film, Caché/Hidden, which painfully probes repressed French national guilt over the country’s colonial history, ends with a lengthy shot of the exterior of a Parisian lycée. This long shot of the steps filmed with a static camera, where we are unable to hear the conversa- tions of the students, captures an unexplained, but potentially unsettling, exchange between young men. This scene brings into the present the troubled past of their fathers, which has been the focus of the film, and which is closely tied to the tortured events of Franco-Algerian relations, and particularly the events of October 1961 when French police massa- cred Algerians protesting about the war in Paris. Thus, the scene extends the film’s central concern from the repression of individual traumatic memory to collective amnesia. Setting this highly charged final scene on the steps of a school underscores the importance to the French ‘imagined community’ of its educational institutions, which since the early days of the Third Republic have been viewed as a bulwark of French national identity. If, on first reading, Caché appears to explore the failure of one man to come to terms with his own personal blind spot where France’s historical ‘Others’ are concerned, its conclusion serves as a pointed SFC 9 (3) pp. 259–272 © Intellect Ltd 2009 259 SFC_9.3_art_Strand_259-272.indd 259 8/18/09 12:18:03 PM 1. For a more com- reminder of the extent to which French schools have been complicit in plete summary of French films focusing transposing that individual failure of vision onto a national stage. on education, see The final scene in Haneke’s film can be viewed as a passing allusion to Vincendeau 2009. a long tradition of French films in which the portrayal of school offers a 2. This and all subse- testing ground for assessing the far-reaching pressures brought to bear on quent translations the social fabric of the country by allegiance to certain bedrock principles from the French are mine. defining Frenchness. For example, Jean Vigo’s controversial 1933 film, Zéro de conduite/Zero for Conduct, proposed all-out rebellion against an authori- tarian educational bureaucracy through the outrageously humorous antics of the students at an oppressive boarding school. Censured by the authori- ties for its anarchist leanings, the film was banned in France until 1945. More than 25 years later, François Truffaut, continuing in the iconoclastic vein the New Wave film-makers inherited from Vigo, took aim at the sti- fling atmosphere of a prototypical Parisian collège. In Les 400 Coups/The 400 Blows (1959), the French language becomes a tool of punishment, as Antoine Doinel is forced to atone for his unacceptable behaviour by con- fronting the daunting intricacies of French verbs. More recently, Nicolas Philibert’s documentary set in a one-room school in the Auvergne, Être et avoir/To Be and To Have (2002) can be interpreted as a nostalgic homage to Republican values, a gentle affirmation of the ‘assimilationist’ model, with a barely perceptible nod to twenty-first century demographics.1 In what follows, I propose to discuss the ways in which two recent films, L’Esquive/The Dodge (Kechiche, 2003) and Entre les murs/The Class (Cantet, 2008), bear evidence of the significant shifts in the understanding of the role French schools play in shaping national identity. As perhaps the leading critic of the educational establishment in France, the late soci- ologist Pierre Bourdieu saw schools as institutions that rationalized social inequalities. Based on a deep distrust of Jacobin ideology, that both sustains and promotes class distinctions, Bourdieu’s assessment concludes that ‘the discourse of equal opportunity is a mystification; the real goal of the schools is to legitimize the privilege of birth by transforming it into aca- demic excellence’ (Derouet 1998: 51).2 In differing ways, the two films I have chosen to discuss engage directly with Bourdieu’s judgment, taking on the flaws of the Republican model of education as they are magnified in two public school settings (a Parisian banlieue in L’Esquive and the city’s twentieth arrondissement in Entre les murs) that, it seems safe to assume, were never imagined by the nineteenth-century founders of public educa- tion in France. Kechiche’s film explores the interplay between what Serge Kaganski has referred to as two ‘incongruous territories’: the high culture that is a central building block in the foundational myth of France’s homogeneous roots and the decidedly more pluralistic popular culture that has found expression primarily (although not exclusively) in the banlieues of France’s major cities (Kaganski 2004). Shot on location in the Franc-Moisin hous- ing projects, L’Esquive traces the efforts of a group of ethnically diverse, economically disadvantaged students to stage the well-known Marivaux play, Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (The Game of Love and Chance). The play’s plot is predicated, as is so often the case, in seventeenth and eighteenth- century comedy, on a quid pro quo; resisting their parents’ efforts to marry them off, sight unseen, to each other, a young upper-class man and 260 Dana Strand SFC_9.3_art_Strand_259-272.indd 260 8/18/09 12:18:03 PM Figure 1: The poster for L’Esquive. Être et parler 261 SFC_9.3_art_Strand_259-272.indd 261 7/21/09 11:10:35 AM woman (Dorante and Silvia) independently convince their servants (valet and chambermaid respectively) to exchange places with them, so each can observe the intended in action before agreeing to the matrimonial bonds. The attraction between false servants and false masters is immedi- ate, but complicated by concerns for class barriers that are perceived to be insurmountable. After much playful marivaudage (or romantic banter), love conquers all and the ‘natural order of things’ is preserved, as masters and servants sort themselves out. In L’Esquive, the narrative focus shifts back and forth from the play within the film, through scenes in which the adolescents rehearse in and outside of the classroom, to their various interactions, as they engage in their own courtship rituals, and talk incessantly to and about each other, continually jockeying for position in a youth culture clearly dominated by their very striking sociolect. The initial link between the Marivaux play and the rest of the film is established early on: the maid, played by Lydia (Sara Forestier), impersonating her mistress, dodges the advances of the valet, played by Rachid (Rachid Hami), who is standing in for his master; just as Lydia sidesteps the clumsy advances of Krimo (Osman Elkharraz), a disturbingly uncommunicative youth, who, for his part, seems to be dodg- ing everything (his former girlfriend, his father in prison, his friend’s