ShareThisLike a good discussion in school, "The Class" will generate debate and argument. Based on an autobiographical novel by Francois Begaudeau, who also stars in the film, "The Class" tells the story of a teacher and his students in a Parisian inner-city junior-high school. The movie, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film, comes out on DVD this week (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $28.96, rated PG-13, spoken in French with English subtitles).
In this case, the argument and debate strike close to home. Although all of us have experiences and opinions about education, I have been immersed in discussions about schools and teaching all my life. My late mother worked for decades as a teacher in one of the toughest high schools in the Bronx, N.Y., and my wife is a veteran elementary-school teacher in Sacramento, Calif. "The Class" provoked considerable disagreement between us.
One of the achievements of "The Class," directed by Laurent Cantet, is that it never follows a typical Hollywood pattern in portraying the relationships between teachers and students. It breaks from the usual stories ("Dangerous Minds," "Freedom Writers," et al.) in which sensitive teachers are confronted by hostile, even scary students, but, after a process in which both sides get to know and trust each other and withstand various personal crises, they reach some sort of positive resolution. The conclusion of "The Class" is far more ambiguous, and thanks to the remarkable performances of the students and teachers in the cast -- none of whom are professional actors -- the characters never come across as stereotypes.
In "The Class," Mr. Marin (Begaudeau), a young but experienced teacher possessing considerable charm, intelligence and verbal acuity, faces continual testing and taunting by his students, often with barely concealed impudence. The 25 students in his class form a multicultural snapshot of modern Parisian society, with students hailing from both North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, from the Caribbean and China, and from throughout France. The students, mostly 14, 15 and 16 years old, appear to be hypersensitive about matters pertaining to race, gender and social status, and are more than willing to argue with their teacher about the curriculum and the world beyond the classroom.
One of the most significant achievements of "The Class" is its realism, in particular the utter believability of the students and teachers. As is explained by Cantet and Begaudeau in the DVD documentary, "The Making of 'The Class,'" a full script was written and provided to students at an acting workshop led by the director, from which the teen-agers learned to improvise. The process served as both a guide to casting decisions and a place to figure out which scenes would remain in the movie. A similar process was used with the teachers.
Both the students and various teachers emerge as having clear and distinctive personalities, some of which are problematic. We see early on that one of Marin's students, Esmeralda, is both bright and manipulative, capable of making learned insights while also eager to undermine her teacher's authority with snide and nasty comments.
"The Class" also shows what is often unseen in films about schools -- that teachers often care deeply about their students and their fellow teachers. One scene is especially striking: The teachers debate, with considerable empathy, the ramifications of a disciplinary action against a student -- will he be beaten by his father, sent back to Mali or end up on the streets, or is it their responsibility to consider the consequences of decisions that will ultimately reside with the student's parents.
To my wife, events leading to a crucial mistake by Marin are themselves false and unrealistic, even given the differences between the public school systems in France and the United States. First of all, the banter between Marin and his students goes far beyond the boundaries of what would be allowed here -- in particular, when one student asks a very pointed question about the teacher's sexual preferences, and he answers it. Certain aspects of the teacher's disciplinary procedures also don't ring true -- such as when Marin confronts an insubordinate student after class, yet leaves the classroom door open so that other students can overhear their conversation.
While problems such as these probably wouldn't matter in a film that was more of a standard Hollywood drama, in a sharply focused docu-drama like "The Class" they clash with the filmmakers' effort to be unflinchingly real.
But, at least for me, the problems don't undermine the impact of this hard-hitting and illuminating film.
(brucedancis(at)comcast.net.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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