The moment the teacher kidnaps her students and then gets into a hotchpotch of moral dilemmas which make her character ambivalent - obviously she had good intentions but goes the wrong way to achieve them, you would expect her to die in the end. It is disappointing to see that you are not disappointed - yes she dies.
The whole film starts from a very strong and challenging premise - the difficult assimilation of the Muslim immigrants into the French society - and just builds towards the inexorable death of the heroine. It didn't grip me though, and I found the pace slow. In its quest for social exploration, it lost the elements of the thriller. And as a social drama, it had too much thriller recipe to allow for the proper exploration of any of the characters.
It also doesn't have a credible thread. In a high school where students shout at and threaten the teacher, carry revolvers and film the rape of their colleague, you would expect the soft looking, elegantly dressed woman to give up her high ideals at the first bullying or beating. She is not congruent with anything around her. Mouss, the other pupils, the minister representative - they are all half-baked characters, you only wonder why do they do what they actually do. The good-cop policeman is probably the worst construed - we understand vaguely he's got some family troubles in the background, but we can't really understand what drives him. With his superior not objecting to what is presumably a clear violation of procedure, he goes in for a heart-to-heart talk with the armed terrorist, he keeps protecting the teacher despite pressure from everyone around him etc. His motives get too little air time to be credible.
Yes, Adjani acts very solidly, the rest of the cast is on and off. But for a film to be enjoyable, it takes a lot more than that.
The whole film starts from a very strong and challenging premise - the difficult assimilation of the Muslim immigrants into the French society - and just builds towards the inexorable death of the heroine. It didn't grip me though, and I found the pace slow. In its quest for social exploration, it lost the elements of the thriller. And as a social drama, it had too much thriller recipe to allow for the proper exploration of any of the characters.
It also doesn't have a credible thread. In a high school where students shout at and threaten the teacher, carry revolvers and film the rape of their colleague, you would expect the soft looking, elegantly dressed woman to give up her high ideals at the first bullying or beating. She is not congruent with anything around her. Mouss, the other pupils, the minister representative - they are all half-baked characters, you only wonder why do they do what they actually do. The good-cop policeman is probably the worst construed - we understand vaguely he's got some family troubles in the background, but we can't really understand what drives him. With his superior not objecting to what is presumably a clear violation of procedure, he goes in for a heart-to-heart talk with the armed terrorist, he keeps protecting the teacher despite pressure from everyone around him etc. His motives get too little air time to be credible.
Yes, Adjani acts very solidly, the rest of the cast is on and off. But for a film to be enjoyable, it takes a lot more than that.