My Review of "La vie scolaire - School Life"

La vie scholaire or School Life kept on popping up on my Netflix suggestions. I was a big fan of another French film called Bad Seeds which had a similar story direction so I decided to take the plunge. This movie is far from similar to Bad Seeds. It's a more realistic and grittier approach than Bad Seeds. You'll have admiration for some of the characters whereas others you won't for different reasons.

The movie starts off with a side by side comparison of the main character Samia and the students that she will have to take care of in her school year. The filmmakers are basically telling us that we all get up the same way whether a student or a teacher and all to get to the same place at the same time.

Samia had actually requested to work in this downtrodden school district of St. Denis France much to the surprise of many of her colleagues. The true reasons why are explained later in the movie.

They will introduce a whole slew of plucky students. They're all going through adolescence in different ways. In particular the movie focuses it's attention to a grade 8 student by the name of Yanis. He's a bright kid but has lost any ambition for himself due to his impoverished lifestyle.

He and many of the introduced students are somewhat like minded. They try to have as much fun as they can because they really don't see themselves having great futures. That's where Samia and her fellow co-workers come into the story.

They teacher's in general want to help these students but even these teachers look at their jobs in different ways. Some of these teachers will go out of their way to help out these kids but there's a few bad apples in the faculty as well.

This movie is full of surprises and some sad moments. Ultimately it's a motivating movie as some of the teachers do see some results from their students. The outcome in this movie isn't as bright as Bad Seeds but I give it respect for going the direction that they did.

The whole cast did a great job portraying their characters. It's interesting because though some of the actors are quite young they were able to play multidimensional characters so well. There were a lot of complicated issues that were addressed in this movie and they knocked it out of the park.

The atmosphere was dark and gritty yet they were able to keep the outlook bright and optimistic. This movie had a nice blend that allowed you to keep questioning what was really going to happen. When you think it's going to be all jokes it would immediately go into something a little darker.

As a side note I did find it kind of funny how they used a song so similar to Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise in this movie. For those that know, Dangerous Minds was a Hollywood movie back in 1995 that was about a woman that left the military to teach inner-city youth. The theme song to that movie was Gangsta's Paradise. In this movie they changed the lyrics to remove Gangsta and replaced it with the song that that Gangsta's Paradise sampled. Stevie Wonder's Past Time Paradise. Of course it wasn't Stevie Wonder who sang it though. This just blew my mind how they went in a full circle like this.

Overall, I enjoyed this movie but personally it wasn't a type of movie that I would want to go watch. Netflix isn't really doing it's job but I'm glad that I got to see it anyways. I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. It is a good movie but it's not something that I would have went out to look for. It deserves to be watched by many but wouldn't be something that I'd normally recommend to my friends.