I’ve just seen my second film of the 2010 French Film Festival currently showing here in Melbourne. Tonight’s film La Journée de la Jupe couldn’t be more different from the film I saw last week, Les Herbes Folles, which I would rather not have seen so that my view of Resnais’ genius, based solely on my viewing of his famous film Hiroshima Mon Amour, made 50 years ago, would have remained intact.

It will take some time for the images and issues of La Journée de la Jupe to cease whirling around in my head. The film takes the issues of the recent Entre les Murs (The Class, in English), also set in a French outer suburban (or rather, les cités—the low socio-economic housing projects inhabited mainly by migrant families) secondary school, to a whole new level.

It’s hard to know where to start in describing the issues: the abuse teachers undergo in very rough schools (an issue relevant also to Australia, attested by the person with whom I saw the film, a former high school English teacher of thirty-five years experience teaching in the outer Melbourne disadvantaged suburbs); misogyny; the generations of disadvantage wrought by first colonialism then late capitalism; alienated Muslim youth; and the inadequacy of many such schools to deal with these issues and to support their own staff.

When abused, stressed, and undervalued French teacher Sonia Bergerac (played brilliantly by Isabelle Adjani, for which she won her fifth or sixth Cesar) discovers a gun in the bag of one of her most troublesome students, during a ‘normal’ lesson in which she is abused, barely listened to, has to physically break up fights, and so on, an unforeseen but (strangely) wholly believable chain of events is set off, and which can only end in tragedy. At first I thought this was going to be a film in which I’d have to sit with my eyes clenched shut (I have a low tolerance for graphic violence), but while I was constantly braced for this eventuality, it didn’t actually happen expect perhaps once or twice towards the end (and I don’t know how graphic those moments were as my eyes were closed). All characters were utterly believable. I don’t know who the young kids were, but they were superb. As with Entre les Murs, the students’ performances were utterly real and gritty, too real in fact.

What saved this film from being a depressing piece of social realism was the thread of black humour which surfaced now and then in deft and unobtrusive ways: the police negotiator’s private troubles, the idiosyncrasies of some of the teacher’s colleagues, and the occasional ‘keystone cops’ moments. But I don’t believe the film ever wavered from its primary genre—that of tragedy. In that, it resembled La Haine (Hatred), another film set in the impoverished world of les cités, existing as a sort of shadow-city of romantic Paris (and probably of many wealthy first-world cities), the underbelly that no one wants to know about. Made in 1995 by Mathieu Kassovitz (who, incidentally, played Amelie’s love interest inLa Haine Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie), that film is more depressing, yet less multifaceted than La Journée de la Jupe. My French Cinema lecturer last semester said that not much had changed in the fifteen years since La Haine was made. Tonight’s film certainly supports that view.

Partially inspired, I think, by a real-life call for a skirt-wearing day (or maybe even a longer period, as the French site calls it a Skirt Spring) by young French people in 2009, in an effort to combat gender inequality and stereotyping, this film was released due to budgetary constraints first on the French/German Arte channel, and then in the cinemas just under a year ago.

Its disturbing story and the issues it explores are as much a part of Paris as they are for other so-called first-world cities, although many visitors to Paris won’t see this side of it, and very likely don’t want to. The question is: can anything be done? And if so, what? At the very least, I’d like to see all politicians going to these films. Starting with Monsieur Sarkozy.