School Life (2019)

Saint-Denis provides the backdrop, and the film wears it without ceremony. A new vice principal named Samia arrives at a middle school where the staff have already surrendered, and she declines to accept their surrender. The students are largely of North African, Black, and mixed-race descent, a casting reality that follows from the setting instead of being arranged for our approval. The film does not pause to congratulate itself on this. It simply lets the corridors fill with the people who actually live there.

The social argument is present and it is genuine. These are underfunded schools in poor immigrant suburbs, and the film understands that the deck is stacked against Yanis, a sharp boy who has decided the world has already dismissed him. Samia is a woman with authority who argues with her colleagues and occasionally wins, which is a quiet sort of progress and nothing more. The critique lands on public education funding and social neglect. It stops short of a broader indictment of capital, and it never turns its characters into mouthpieces. The message arrives through a boy who wants to make movies, a more effective delivery system than a speech.

What the film declines to do is equally instructive. There is no romantic thread outside the conventional register, no environmental sermon, no meditation on body image, no neurodivergent subplot, no reworking of history to suit present taste. It is also funny in places, gently so. This is a humanist social drama, and humanism is an old garment. It fits well. It is not the same thing as a modern ideological program, and the distinction matters to anyone keeping careful records. I keep careful records. School Life is warm, well-observed, and only mildly preachy at the edges. It earns its sentiment honestly and asks for very little in return.