This story builds quietly, almost invisibly, through the film, and culminates in the disciplinary hearing in which Souleymane's non-French-speaking mother is present and in which the gloweringly silent and defiant pupil must translate her passionate and heartbreaking defence of him as a good boy. Like the rest of the film, this scene is natural and unforced and effortlessly persuasive, but it is the non-dramatic sequences that I somehow found the most gripping. François has a lesson in which he simply demonstrates at some length the imperfect subjunctive tense.