La Vie Scolaire by Grand Corps Malade, et Mehdi Idir (review)

This second box office hit for Grand Corps Malade and Medhi Idir comes after their first, Patients (2016), based on Grand Corps Malade's year in a rehabilitation center following a miscalculated pool dive that Fabien Marsaud (the author's birth name) took in 1997. Back then, he was supervising a basketball camp, but the accident left him grappling with a paraplegia diagnosis. However, the rehabilitation year ended with Marsaud exiting the clinic with a cane, which he still uses today. Before that, Marsaud lived in the Seine-Saint-Denis banlieue where he stood out in school for strong academic achievement, arts, and athleticism. Idir grew up in those schools too, but did not have the same potential as Marsaud. Immediately after his bac, Idir pursued videography training. By 2007, he had established his reputation as a go-to music and marketing videographer. A year earlier, Idir collaborated with Marsaud, who was then already calling himself Grand Corps Malade, a slammeur who had pushed the art into worldwide popularity. The two former Seine-Saint-Denis students, though not from the same schools, became fast friends upon meeting in the art world they both frequented. Idir began producing world-class videos of Grand Corps Malade's slammeur performances. Since then, every collaboration has met with resounding success, including their latest film. If Patients is the artistic rendering of Grand Corps Malade's life-changing event, many consider that La vie scolaire, a hybrid banlieue/education film, more closely aligns with Idir's story. But both films are more aptly described as sheer poetic visions. It is thus difficult—if not impossible—to judge them solely on narrow autobiographical or documentary grounds. La vie scolaire is indeed filmed around and in the very middle school Idir attended, culling non-professional actors—a process called "wild casting"—from the student body enrolled there at the time. Criticizing this film for romanticizing education in the banlieue, especially in "zones sensibles," would drag us into fruitless and, frankly, boring debates. Cinematically, La vie scolaire is just about perfect. This means that its cinematography, editing, soundtrack, sound engineering, color palette, acting, dialogue, lighting, rhythm and more, come together as a great symphony does. Thus for example, seeing Idris in the fictional Yanis, one of the film's main protagonists, forecloses on more original interpretations that the film's pure poetry invites. True, Yanis represents the good student who cannot see what matters, given his circumstances. Yet, the film's symphonic harmony holds to the end, refusing the conventional happy or tragic finale. Instead, viewers are left with the ambivalent image of Yanis, of his inability to imagine a better future reinforced by the context he finds himself in.