After the animated shorts ended, I barely had time to scurry across Sixth Avenue and over to Washington Square Park, where I'd arranged to meet my cousin after her law class at NYU. I told her we absolutely had to go to dinner together before I left the City, and this was my last night.
We had over an hour before our show at the nearby Angelika Film Center (map). First we dropped by the theater to confirm the showtime, and then we spotted the neon lights of a restaurant across Houston Street in SoHo. It turned out to be Fanelli's Cafe on Prince Street (map). It was place I've been several times years ago, where I'd even met out-of-town friends, and a person for a job interview. It seemed uncanny to be back at such a familiar place.
We had cheeseburgers and talked about her law classes. She was taking a course this semester on copyright law. We discussed Lawrence Lessig's ideas, and I brought up some IP issues I'd encountered writing for Wikipedia a couple years back.
I told her she should make sure to enjoy her last few months of law school, since it would never be the same after that.
"Years from now," I said, "I'll ask you, 'Hey, remember that time I visited you when you were in law school?'"
We timed dinner perfectly to get back to the Angelika and buy tickets for the show. We descended the escalators to the basement, where the auditoriums are, and found a seat among the already crowded aisles, near the front and along the side.
The movie follows a teacher at a middle school in Paris during the course of a school year. Through much of the movie, it feels in the style of a documentary, chronicling the class in real time.
During the opening scene, we are in a room full of teachers at the school as they introduce each other. It turns out the protagonist is in his fourth year there, and thus the story contains both his exasperation and his experience mixed together, along with his rapport with previous students. Without even knowing what will happen, we feel an ominous sense for the burdens of the first year teachers in the room.
The most dominant theme in the narrative is the unruliness of the class, much of it derived from seemingly irreconcilable multicultural clashes of the students from the various parts of France's erstwhile colonial empire. In many ways, it seems like the kind of problems that plagued American public schools in previous decades, and thus the movie has an almost "throwback" feel to American audiences. The lesson is that European schools may be on the verge of facing many of the cataclysms that have swept through and devastated American public education.
On a lower level, the story is about the teacher's often-tempestuous one-on-one relationships with his students. In this case, the movie is very fine-grained, and the most glaring emotional stress is the story is the teacher's attempt to be individual and fair.
The story culminates in the expulsion hearing of a male student from Mali who has caused severe disruption in the class. He had crossed the line, angered the teacher, and their relationship had passed a tragic point of no return.
As the movie let out, I asked my cousin if she spoke French, and she said she didn't.
I explained to her something about the movie I had noticed, but which would slip by English-speaking audiences. "The unforgivable act by the student was that he used the familiar form of the second person pronoun with the teacher. The French have a special verb for it, tutoyer, which doesn't exist in English. They couldn't really translate it correctly."
The tutoyer incident seemed like a "hold-the-line" moment for the teacher, trying to keep the old-style decorum and respect of the class, even as he broached the boundaries of familiarity in an attempt to connect with them. In a sense, this was the tragic moment of the story, the point at which the simultaneous demands cannot be satisfied. He needed to be both tu and vous to them, he could not, and it was the student in question who wound up paying the price.
One of the things I didn't realize about the Angelika was that it is right next to a subway line (the R/W line, I think). Every ten minutes or so, you could hear the roar of a train passing by, which got a little distracting.
But all in all, it was the perfect way to end my short visit back to City, my first in over four years. I'd kept myself very busy, having seen seven feature films, and over a dozen short films. If nothing else, it had been a fun exploration of the movie theaters of Manhattan.
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