Lashings of literary quotations, francophone banter and one-liners atop a dialog based on epithets probably give it artistic merit to some minds and if you are a gay and/or terminally jaundiced and world-weary teacher it may well have some meaning for you.<br /><br />For the other 99.9% of humanity, this is a thinly-disguised rose-colored vanguard for destigmatising man-boy love and as such is odious and disingenuous.<br /><br />We all know that teenage boys are obsessed with sex but to suggest that so many are actively homo/bi/curious is just wishful thinking on someone's part. <br /><br />The preoccupation with sex on the part of the adults as well gives greater insight into the writer and directors' minds as epitomized in a scene where one of the boys on being rebuffed by a gay teacher gives some tart comment to the effect that "you are really daring when it comes to talking and thinking but something real happens, you get all cautious"(paraphrased). So, in this film, sex (specifically gay sex) is more 'real' than all the puffery about the value of education that it otherwise pontificates on. A curious perspective but one I am very glad to not share.<br /><br />To add tedium to odium, it is also badly made. Star turns by the three adult leads were the only thing that kept me seated but were not enough to rescue this turkey. There are numerous technical flaws as noted elsewhere, the contrived ending is cringingly gauche and the headmaster character races past cliché and pythonesque parody in his caricature to become a sad commentary on pro-gay prejudice in film-making.<br /><br />This is one of two films in the past five years that have made me want to walk out. Since this one actually irritated me enough to write and warn people off it; it now stands in my humble opinion as the worst film I have seen this century.