Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  The Promise land involves much self-sacrifice. When these teens go to the movies, they can’t even go into a PG-13 picture because of the ‘heavy making out’. So cultural life is entirely comprised of family-oriented cartoons. Teeth is about lots of anti-Bible Belt stuff, but one of its themes is the belief, among the reactionary, that temptations to be ‘bad’ will not occur if you don’t look or listen to anything, what with things like sex, violence and hedonism being unnatural in some way, and only planted in us by a debased liberal culture. Unfortunately, Tobey must have missed this psychological memo because, as the cartoons honk away, he is looking at Dawn as if she is food. In fact, it becomes increasingly obvious that The Promise kids and adults talk about absolutely nothing but sex, under the guise of pretending to avoid it.

  As we journey towards the gory inevitable, Lichtenstein has much fun with phallic belching chimneys, vaginal holes in trees and creationist heckling during science lessons about creatures who suddenly evolve nasty mutations for protection. Meanwhile, Dawn is having rule-breaking wedding-themed wank fantasies that feature slobbering monster mouths where her orgasms ought to be. Everyone who saw Teeth knew what the USP was before entering, so Lichtenstein has to make the build-up suspenseful, poignant and very, very funny, without letting his cast get all slapstick or ironic, thereby both depoliticising the movie and undercutting the scary. He does so, quite brilliantly.

  In keeping with the beauty/beast thematic contrasts, the horror kicks off in the most beautiful setting possible. Dawn and Tobey give in to temptation and meet for a swim-date in a sun-dappled woodland lake complete with caves and waterfalls. ‘This does not feel wrong at all,’ Tobey whispers as they kiss, and how could it, immersed in water, blessed by warmth, alone in paradise? Teen romance really is great, isn’t it? Teen sex, though: that can be more problematic. The pair move out of the warmth and light of the lake and into the cold darkness of a cave. Bad move. Tobey makes a smooth transition from gambolling innocent to rapist to man looking at his own detached penis lying in a pool of blood on a rock, like a big stillborn slug. He screams a lot. So does she. And who can blame them?

  From there, Teeth is an absorbing trip through the extraordinary performance of Ms Weixler, who plays the horror for laughs and the feminism straight as she journeys from peppy ingénue to shocked victim to horny slut to cynical castrator without missing a beat; a scene at a gynaecologist’s surgery (a memorable turn from Josh Pais as the Doctor From Hell) which manages to encompass both every male and female nightmare imaginable, self-mocking Buffyesque supernaturalisms; a wonderfully inappropriate seduction complete with comedy sex toy, much post-But I’m A Cheerleader (see here) savaging of conservative American values; the usual Bad Dad replaced by one motherfucker of a Bad Son; the ultimate revenge for every one of those we-made-a-bet-I-could-shag-you plot clichés; and awe-inspiring grossness involving cocks being fucked by crabs and eaten by dogs.

  Yet, somehow, Teeth finds a way to be a celebration of budding female sexuality and, thanks to the luminously beautiful Weixler, a genuinely erotic one. Lichtenstein’s ability to lurch from one mood to its extreme opposite is unique, and probably only possible for directors who are shooting their own scripts. He knows exactly what he’s trying to say, and how to say it, and there isn’t a moment of bad faith or throwaway flippancy here.

  Basically . . . if you repress natural things in young women in order to feed your own hypocritical and perverted misanthropy, you are going to lose something precious in a very painful way. Having made its point, Teeth ends exactly as it should: with a wave goodbye to those phallic chimneys, a young woman transformed into a mean motherfucking angel of penis death, and a dirty old man who’s bitten off way more than he can chew. One last gleeful chuckle from the most original teen slasher movie of its day.

  THE CLASS

  2008

  Starring: François Bégaudeau, Franck Keita, Esmeralda Ouertani, Rachel Regulier, Boubacar Toure

  Dir.: Laurent Cantet

  Plot: The Parisian Blackboard Jungle.

  Key line: ‘Young people now have no shame.’

  The Class is a very different kind of high school movie. Shot in stripped-down documentary style, it follows one school year in a rough, ethnically mixed school in Paris through the eyes of one French teacher and one class that he teaches. It is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by teacher François Bégaudeau, who also stars in the movie and co-wrote the screenplay. Its unknown cast and shaky, voyeuristic camerawork make the film feel entirely improvised, although it isn’t. But the principal teens are ordinary high school kids, mainly using their own names and asked to improvise around specific characters from Bégaudeau’s novel Entre les murs (which is also the French title of the movie and translates as ‘Between These Walls’). It gained a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; the first French film to do so since 1987. It blows away everyone who sees it but not enough people have, due to its absence of superheroes, icebergs and boys jumping into pits of shit. You come out of the film feeling like someone sent you back to school for a week, so accurately does it capture the tensions of the inner-city classroom.

  The opening scenes point out that teachers are more similar to pupils than we imagine. The new ones are welcomed to the school by the old ones in an encounter meeting. They are nervous and shy when making their introductions. They assemble in a classroom and chatter amongst themselves as the head hands them folders with their classes for the new year. There is something childlike in their attempts to bond happily before being sent off to struggle, alone, with the unknown. An old hand goes through a list of a new boy’s students saying, simply: ‘Nice. Nice. Not nice. Nice . . . She’s not nice at all,’ and you recall being the new boy in school and having some older kid say exactly the same thing about your list of teachers.

  An early exchange in the classroom defines the movie’s agenda by pointing out something true and universal and extremely important about teenagers that no other film in this book either notices or cares about in quite the same way. That is, that when we are aged somewhere between 13 and 17, we are much smarter than adults take us for, but in a petty, misguided and massively irritating way.

  The class enter the classroom and embark upon a time-honoured first-day-of-school tradition. They chat excitedly to each other in noisy cliques and ignore the teacher François Marin, played by Bégaudeau. He finally gets them to quieten down and launches into a typical teacher gambit about how many minutes of teaching time are lost to pupils refusing to just shut up and focus, and how many minutes of how many hours are lost in a year, and that other schools do a full hour on each lesson and therefore you will end up miles behind. A black girl called Khoumba (Regulier) starts to say something. Marin insists she put her hand up. She does and then points out that each timetabled lesson is actually 55 minutes long and therefore there are no other schools doing hour-long lessons, and Mr Marin is a liar. Marin is temporarily nonplussed, because she is, of course, right, but utterly and deliberately missing the point as only a teenager can. He regains composure and moves on. The camera is positioned throughout as if you are seated at a desk bang in the middle of the order and chaos, and, occasionally, a kid catches your eye and wonders what you’re looking at before deciding you are not worth bothering with.

  It’s this drip-drip-drip of teenage one-upmanship that makes this class memorably real, provides the comic and traumatic moments, makes you like or dislike various characters, gives you a bracing glimpse into the pains of the teaching profession and drives the tale towards its inevitable points of conflict in an organic, anti-cinema way. Plenty of contemporary youth docu-dramas insist that ordinary people are more interesting than sexy film stars pretending to be ordinary people, but then undercut this worthy premise by finding dull people to play dislikeable characters in tales that find no space for hope or optimism. The Class is just better film-making driven by a man working from life experience rather than a perverse desire to establ
ish indie credentials by drowning in bleakness. I’m thinking about the worst recent teen movies by Ken Loach (see Kes, here), Larry Clark (see Kids and Bully, pp. 328 and 409) and Shane Meadows, as well as those by professional misery guts like Peter Mullan, Hal Hartley and Michael Haneke.

  The story develops around Marin, charismatic Tunisian tough girl Esmeralda (Ouertani), Khoumba, classic back-of-the-class hip hop-informed bad boy Souleymane (Keita) and his waggish mate Boubacar (Toure). Bégaudeau’s Marin is a great, real, noble but flawed character. He is trying to do the right thing but is often defeated by both the weight of colonial history and inner-city social exclusion, as well as his own ego. Like his students, he’s not quite as bright as he thinks he is. The kids amuse themselves by drawing him into pointless debates, pretending that they don’t understand basic phrases (shades of The Blackboard Jungle, see here) or taking issue with his choice of words for contrived racial reasons, and they ‘wipe him out’ constantly because he just can’t resist trying to be the biggest smartarse in the room. Bégaudeau deliberately messes with the viewer’s sympathy for him, contrasting the admiration you feel for a man trying to teach French to an ethnically mixed class of kids who happily profess their hatred of France, with scenes in the staff room where he actively discourages other teachers from asking them to study Voltaire because he has no respect for their potential. He swings between the determined and positive and the dangerously jaded and cynical, something which you imagine every teacher must inevitably feel when confronted daily by children who feel that knowledge is somehow irrelevant or even uncool, and who live to be distracted.

  But sometimes these kids are genuinely sly and funny, and Marin can’t help but be amused. Just like the viewer; although one imagines that enjoyment of the wind-up humour of the kids is dependent on how much you remember being that kid, and whether you enjoyed it at the time, and if part of you has never stopped finding the mocking of authority funny. Despite being an obviously adult film, I still suspect that the young and young-at-heart will derive the most pleasure from The Class, and that those who immediately tense up and become irritated by loud teens on the bus will find this movie as grating as nails raked down a blackboard.

  This is one of the many reasons why the August 2011 riots in England were so upsetting. The selfish, greedy, mocking nature of the looting and vandalism, the absence of anything amounting to real protest or political engagement, and the news media’s constant insistence that the perpetrators were all teenagers (the resulting arrests and court cases proved this was not true), reinforced the ever-widening chasm in Britain between middle-class adults and working-class youth by seeming to prove that the nation’s contempt for and fear of ‘chavs’ (white) and ‘hoodies’ (black) was entirely justified. Inflicting swingeing economic cuts upon youth services that are desperately needed in key problem areas is going to be easy to justify because conservative adults in those areas will support those cuts. They want revenge. They see the youth underclass as unworthy of help. They insist that they are all the same. The young and the poor are always the first to be hit by the consequences of the economic fuck-ups of the wealthy because voters hate them and it’s a no-risk strategy – at least until they start setting fire to things, which is never our fault. We are never culpable. You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts . . .

  Sorry. I should be paying attention at the back of The Class and not quoting from Radiohead songs to make hand-wringing liberal points. I see that now. Please continue.

  So . . . the kids wind Marin up in class. But sometimes it’s not to mock or distract, but to make important points. One of the best scenes in The Class involves Marin attempting to teach the kids ‘the imperfect subjunctive’. Suddenly, The Class is talking directly to those ’50s teen movies where other groups of juvenile delinquents were zoning out while Teach attempts to explain ‘the subjunctive mood’. There is a conversation that explains why old screenwriters were fond of that joke. Because Marin is standing in front of a group of children whose parents come from other countries and speak different languages, trying to establish the relevance of learning the ‘proper’ way to speak French when, as Boubacar points out, ‘We’re not gonna start talking this way in the street. We’ll get called stupid!’

  We know the relevance, of course. You learn to talk and write the native tongue in the correct way, and all doors to social mobility are open. You might get into college. You will be able to apply and interview well for better jobs. Plus, a world of art and literature will become accessible to you and broaden your horizons, and get you out of a ghetto you didn’t ask to be trapped in in the first place. But this is the nub of the crux of social exclusion: if a child’s expectations have been set low, and if survival in their area is dependent on taking on the moral codes, dress styles and language of those around them, then the idea that education means movement and movement means choice and choice means fulfilment is as distant as the notion of becoming an astronaut or marrying Bill Gates. The only lessons that seem useful are ones that you can apply right now to get you through the next few days without falling off the edge of the world. The only rewards worth pursuing are immediate and material and symbolic of status, not deferred and dependent on following the agenda of those in power, who speak a different language and are not interested in yours until it pops up in a rap record or an episode of The Wire, in which case they’ll co-opt it in order to look cool. Without any grandstand speeches or actorly emotings, this modest and strikingly spontaneous scene illuminates the failures of post-imperialist capitalism, the political nature of language, and the reasons a section of our children have no interest in our agenda.

  But the downside of a teacher allowing his pupils to express themselves is immediate. Souleymane and Boubacar attempt to humiliate Marin by questioning his sexuality. They do this with low teen cunning, making it sound like an innocent enquiry rather than a challenge to his authority. Marin has to handle the homophobic taunting while remaining a good liberal, and without losing his temper or driving a wedge between himself and his class by just sending Souleymane off to the head. And he does, expertly. But can you imagine dealing with that crap every day when all you want to do is make children’s lives a little better? No wonder Bégaudeau felt compelled to write a novel and make a film about his experiences. Someone has to stand up for the teachers as well as the kids. The Class does, so deftly that you will leave the film with assumptions about teens and teachers significantly altered.

  Despite the heckling, Marin actually does successfully engage most of his students most of the time, although his biggest battle is not with outright hostility, but their inability to concentrate. But war eventually breaks out – in a way familiar to anyone who went to an inner-city state school – in a scene suffused with tension.

  The whole class have failed to read a passage from The Diary Of Anne Frank for homework. Marin asks one black girl, the usually talkative Khoumba, to read the passage out to the class. She refuses. In seconds this has turned to an accusation of singling her out which is impossible to argue against because, if you ask one kid to do something that none of the classmates has done, you have, in effect, singled them out. If you choose any child, you’ve ‘singled them out’, if they’re in the mood to take offence. The scene becomes racially charged without anyone having to say the ‘R’ word. All Marin can do is admit defeat and ask Esmeralda instead. Thankfully, she assents. But you understand how every perfectly reasonable teaching instruction could be the match that lights the blue touch-paper, and how much the children hold the balance of power in this unspoken agreement of education by mutual consent.

  Taking his cue from . . . Anne Frank, Marin asks the class to write their own self-portraits. This is doubly smart screenwriting because the movie never leaves the school, and we’re not going to see what’s happening at home to make these children so alienated from learning; they are going to have to tell us in their own words.

  Of course, the movie’s title is a double-edged
pun. The class don’t believe that Marin – or anyone of his class – is really interested in their lives, or understands what it’s like to feel ashamed of where you come from or how you look. One Arab kid, Rabah (Rabah Nait Oufella), memorably dismisses the entire French middle class as ‘camemberters’ – people who stink of expensive cheese. But then he confesses that he believes, when all is said and done, that they are better than him and he doesn’t deserve to be in their company. This is said and shot without sentimentality – this is a movie with no incidental music and no cinematic tricks employed to tell you how to feel – and is quietly devastating while still acknowledging the comic stoicism of working-class youth. Marin asks him if his exclusion from this party thrown by camemberters was ‘a race thing’. ‘I dunno,’ the boy replies, smiling sourly, ‘but the crisps were bacon-flavoured.’

  The big problem in class is Souleymane, who refuses to express himself on the printed page. He likes photography, though, so Marin encourages him to produce a diary in pictures. And it’s all going so well, in an encouraging-alienated-kid’s-potential sort of way . . . until it isn’t. Because The Class isn’t Dangerous Minds or Freedom Writers – or To Sir, With Love (see here), for that matter – and a nice middle-class person isn’t going to tame the savages with some peppy attitude and high-fives. Souleymane’s rage is a done deal. And it has to find a release eventually. Meanwhile, a new kid arrives, Marin allows himself to be goaded into an insult that threatens his career, a child’s mother is threatened with deportation, kids really do learn stuff and it ends with a football match . . . a game in the no man’s land of the playground to signal a temporary ceasefire between school and children.