The school classroom has always provided inspiration for screenwriters, right back from 'The Blackboard Jungle' in 1955 as Glenn Ford struggled to control a class of unruly teenagers in a New York inner-city school; more recently, we've had 'The Wire', whose 4th season is dedicated to an examination of the American public education system as we follow former officer Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski in his first year as a Maths teacher at a Baltimore inner-city school. And who could forget Michelle Pfeiffer in 'Dangerous Minds' in 1995, the film that spawned the chart-topping single 'Gangsta's Paradise'. It's easy to see why this framework is often repeated since it offers a simple and direct platform for an inspirational story: new teacher encounters disillusioned teenagers and lifts their spirits so they can reach new heights. It's a plot outline that more or less applies to all these examples; even 'The Wire's more gritty approach still has moments of idealism, despite the story's conclusion being more pessimistic (or perhaps actually realistic). Yet a much more recent offering from France comes at it from a relatively new angle.

Laurent Cantet's 'Entre Les Murs' ('The Class') follows the lives of a French teacher, François Marin, and his class of 14 to 15-year olds throughout a school year. Unlike the newcomers of the above examples, Marin has been teaching at outer-suburban school in Paris for some years and knows exactly what he faces each and every day: a battlefield where teachers and students face off against each other in a constant power struggle. Alliances are made and broken at the flick of a switch; a good relationship with a student can easily turn sour in a matter of hours. Students aren't the only ones Marin has to put up with; parents complain about disruptive students hindering their children's learning, disciplinary boards dish out punishments on his students, and teachers even argue amongst themselves about how to control these "animals".

Whilst the film deals with all the above points throughout the film, the main narrative thread involves Marin (François Bégaudeau) and Soulemayne (Franck Keďta), an unmotivated student with Malian origins. Marin tries to challenge the apathetic Soulemayne, stimulating the teenager's interests to encourage him to participate more. However, Soulemayne's stubbornness gets the better of him, resulting in a heated argument between that ends with a fellow classmate injured and his eventual expulsion.

But to reduce the film to one plotline is to miss the point of the film completely. The extended classroom scenes are what reveal the true significance of the film, providing an insight into the complex relationships between teacher and student that are in constant ebb and flow. In one of them, we see Marin trying to teach the imperfect subjunctive to his class; they complain that he's teaching them an antiquated form of French that no-one (they know) uses. Marin then realises the condraction of trying to reach out to these teenagers through a cultural tradition they're simply not a part of. As they themselves point out, they aren't French; they're Moroccan, Algerian, Malian, Arab, Chinese, anything but French. As was also pointed out in 'L'Esquive', this language does not belong to them, they've come to develop their own language, one which only they understand and which insulates from the rest of French society (throughout the film, Marin asks his students to "translate" the slang they use). In the end, Marin conceeds that it is a language of the bourgeois but that one must learn it before one can question it.

The film was based on a novel, written by Bégaudeau himself and who also adapted the screenplay, which is somewhat surprising since it feels so cinematic in style. The classroom scenes have a very naturalistic feel to them, as if they were happening right there and then. It's a testament to Bégaudeau's writing but also the quality of the actors since it's clear that each scene has a purpose to it and is not just a rehearsed improvisation. Bégaudeau also manages to depict a myriad of rounded characters, particularly in Marin's classroom but also among the teachers. Whilst they seem a little more caricatured than the students, the episodes they appear in breathes life into them; one highlight that demonstrates this is a meeting in which they are discussing a new, effective system of punishment for the schoolchildren. Each teacher offers an opinion, ranging from very authoritarian to a much more liberal approach. However, within minutes the discussion has moved onto the fact that the coffee machine has gone up 10 cents. Evidently it's a comment on the banality of issues discussed in the education system but it also shows that in the end they're just people like the rest of us. Who wouldn't be annoyed that the price of a coffee went up for no apparent reason?

Having been the first French film in over 20 years to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the film has definitely made a stir in its home country and around the world. Perhaps it's because it's a familiar story and yet is one everyone's in the dark about. Do teachers understand they're students? Do students understand their teachers? Do parents have any clue what's really going in the classroom? Pigeon-holeing the characters into these different categories continues to be the education system's biggest downfall, as the film's final scenes suggest. We see all the conflict throughout the film that occurs in the classroom and yet in the end we see everyone enjoying an end-of-year football match in the schoolyard. The division between student and teacher has been demolished, at least temporarily; the juxtaposition of this image with that of an empty classroom with chairs scattered around suggests that the problem isn't the relationship between the teachers and the students, it's the dynamic itself and the inherent conflict within it. Far from being an environment where knowledge is exchanged, the classroom has more or less become a No Man's Land.