Director: Philippe Falardeau
Year Released: 2011
Rating: 1.5
Following the suicide of their female teacher at a grade school in Montreal, an immigrant from Algeria (Mohamed Fellag) steps in to teach her class only to find spirits are low and the students can't seem to get over the tragic death of their former teacher. This basically addresses all of its key points within the first third and proceeds to hammer those points home throughout: by act three they're still in a state of shock and still yammering about their former teacher. The character Lazhar lost his own wife to an attack in Algeria and appears equally distraught - as a parallel to the students' loss - although the old adage "life goes on" (which presumably everyone 'learns' in this) doesn't make for a poignant conclusion. As a teacher, I immediately figured out that Lazhar wasn't trained to be an instructor, so there's no actual way he would have been hired in the first place, and how he wasn't immediately dismissed for smacking a student in the head (and then lying about it) just took me out of the movie. This is a simple and shallow examination of grief, but the young actors and actresses who play the students are very good.
