Les grandes esprits

The English title — The Teacher — is a serious deviation from the original French: Les grandes esprits. Esprit can mean mind or spirit. The great mind will be open to differences in spirit. The title shifts the emphasis from the students to the teacher, from the fringe immigrant class to the privileged white man, from the great spirits to the conventional disciplinarian. 

In the posh Paris school where we meet him, M. Foucault is equally generous complimenting the good students and insulting the majority.  He carries that insulting manner to his new school, which at first sight looks like a prison but turns out to be an open, generally comfortable institution despite its lower standards and achievement. Teachers even let their classes have tea parties. 

These marginalized kids are the “great spirits” of the title, wild, energetic, undisciplined, yet detached by their inability to escape their expectation of inevitable failure. The classes are predominantly black but the students appear happy, well-dressed, and for the most part obedient. But the school admin and teachers are relentlessly white. 

  The chief lesson in the film is the well-regarded teacher Foucault’s conversion from assuming unassailable superiority to trying to help his disadvantaged charges succeed. He stops judging them to help them. When he leaves his highly regarded Paris school for the disdained suburb -- i.e., The Immigrants -- he opens himself to new growth as a teacher and as a human. Of course, “Foucault” alludes to the seminal thinker in the Left’s current cultural theory. 

      The film’s Foucault gradually mends his ways to get through to his new class. He countenances their cheating and alters his teaching strategy and class topics to let his students feel some success. Once he breaks their expectation of failure they have a chance to succeed. 

Seydou, whom Foucault initially calls stupid, develops a new self-respect, a new interest, a new courage. He ultimately eschews the gang life to return to school.

Foucault’s success with Seydou is at least in part due to his taking a personal interest in him beyond the classroom. He advises him how to impress his romantic interest Maya, then intervenes to reverse the boy’s expulsion. This turns his most antagonistic pupil into a friend. In perhaps the film’s most touching moment, Seydou sits beside Foucault after the choir performance, each bemoaning his own romantic failure.  

Foucault’s strategy alienates some of his more conventional — and self-concerned — colleagues, who think he is courting cheap popularity by his generous grading. Seydou’s expulsion is presumably caused by his antipathetic maths teacher, who resents his girl-friend Chloe’s friendship with Foucault. 

Foucault is given an interesting background. Even the successful teacher still moves in the shadow of his father, a very famous author who may be “the TV guy” a student cites. There’s a chill in the father’s signing his book to his son. Foucault’s sister is an international figure developing an artists’ residence in Tokyo. So the teacher’s reputation and his command of his classroom may still fall short of his family’s status. 

Foucault apparently has no personal life.  He is clearly out of his element at his new colleagues’ party. He seems to be courting the Ministry woman when he suggests more experienced teachers be assigned to the suburbs. He mistakes her lunch invitation to be a personal date and is disappointed when it turns out to be a business meeting — at which he finds himself trapped in the one-year school transfer.  

His romantic hopes are dashed again when Chloe leaves with her lover for Canada. The result is to define him totally as the teacher. Outside that function he is nothing. With heroic selflessness he learns to serve and to liberate the great spirits of his underprivileged students. But he remains restricted in himself.

The film has an interesting political underpinning. Indeed its primary focus may be culture not education. In emphasizing proper French grammar, the classic field trip to Versailles, the teaching of Victor Hugo, Foucault and the film staunchly advocate the promotion of traditional French culture. Foucault has no interest in examining or advancing the immigrants’ own cultural background, nor the current pop scene (staff pot party apart). His and the film’s assumption is that today has to respect yesterday. Immigrants to France have to become French, have to adopt their host culture, and not try to import and advance their own instead. 

The other side is represented by the violent gang Seydou briefly joins. They disdain the community of old France and seek to impose their own will and their own forms of liberty, fraternity and inequality. 
      In this insistence upon preserving their own national culture France presents a strong model for contemporary Europe as its massive immigration challenges their cultural norms. In the rest of Europe the old culture may be buckling to the insistent new. Even France harbours resistant pockets, sealed communities of Seydou's gang. This point is what makes this film especially pertinent today. For this Foucault unapologetically defends French tradition in art, values, civilization and grammar, even as -- in the film's last joke -- he seems to be apologizing.