Armond can lick my sweaty taint.
I've taught summer classes to snotty kids from all sorts of backgrounds who're behind in school, and the idea that
It’s all designed to flatter the middle-class art-film audience’s patronizing attitude toward the Third World.These kids’ claim on the conscience of the bourgeois West invokes post-9/11 guilt—a piety so strong that it fools many liberals into mistaking their condescension for empathy.
is nothing more than Armond's asinine condescension projected onto people who actually get out once in a while. Having been around kids like those in
The Class, I try really hard to be empathic and usually fail. It sucks when your audience not only has no interest in what you're trying to do, but actively works to prevent you from doing it. Does that automatically mean they're bad people? No, but sometimes the kids are just shitheads, and sometimes growing up in unfortunate circumstances just makes people ignorant and stupid. I've wanted to call my kids "skanks" and worse, and have held my temper, but it's not hard to imagine someone slipping up after being pushed long and hard enough. It's a fairly realistic reaction.
Bégaudeau brightens when his most hostile pupil says she’s just read Plato’s The Republic. Plainly, she’s learned nothing from it, yet Cantet accepts this apple-polishing as victory.
Is Armond really that naive a viewer that he makes no distinction between the character's and director's respective viewpoints?!?!? OF COURSE Bégaudeau brightens up--I know the feeling well, but how many high school students from
any background are going to get something from
The Republic? (At Rutgers, I doubt anybody other than poli sci majors get anything out of it, and maybe it's enough to be satisfied with at least opening a window in the student's mind to a world beyond the limited one they already know.) That doesn't mean Cantet lacks a certain ironic distance from Bégaudeau. Maybe Armond oughta learn how to read (books or films) more carefully before he throws stones from glass houses.
Our imperfect democracy has surpassed this French liberal romanticism at least since Robert Mulligan’s 1967 film Up the Down Staircase. When Sandy Dennis’ suburban white teacher coped with the turmoil of an urban high school, a veteran casually advised, “You can’t give up, and you can’t give them up. They’ve been given up already. We’re their last chance. Or maybe they’re our last chance.” Cantet doesn't quite know how to say that.
Who's the romantic now? Cantet's too smart to say it because it reeks of sentimentality, and that's not what his film is about. Jesus, the worst type of critic is one who rips on the ideology of others from the safety of his own sheltered existence while pretending that he's somehow not guilty of trying to impose his own, even more limited ideology on every fucking film he watches. Sometimes, Armond, a film adopts
realism as its aesthetic!! Not all films, Armond, have to conform to someone's romantic vision of film morality!!! As if we didn't already go through this argument 150 years ago when Flaubert and Baudelaire were put on trial for offending the ruling aesthetic morality.
](./images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall")
If there's a more narrow-minded asshole than Armond White writing film criticism today, god help us all.
