The title of the French film The Class, winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film, literally translates as “between the walls.”
That’s fitting, because director Laurent Cantet sees the classroom as its own world, as well as a microcosm of the larger one with all its simmering class tensions. Not one scene takes place outside the aging Parisian inner-city junior high school where the film is set; very few scenes even occur outside the classroom where Francois (Francois Begaudeau) teaches French.
Traditionally, those walls have been seen as a monastery-like sanctum free from the nasty incursions of the real world. But for the tough, multi-ethnic students in Francois’ class — many of them immigrants from former French colonies in Africa — those can be prison-like walls. While the teacher goes over the difficult and dull conjugation of verbs, they are still bristling at the legacy of colonial subjugation. They have a name for Francois and the old, privileged France he represents: camemberters, “people who stink of cheese.”
As films about schools go, this is one of the best in recent memory. It’s also an excellent companion to the 2002 French documentary To Be and To Have, about a teacher at a one-room school-house in rural France.
Cantet, whose films such as Time Out and Heading South tackle social issues without preachy agendas, has adapted (with writer Robin Campillo) an autobiographical novel by former teacher Begaudeau, who plays a version of himself in the film. The student-actors actually attended an inner-city Paris school — those chosen for the film spent a year in workshops learning to create characters that might or might not share similarities with their own experiences and backgrounds.
Shot in high-definition video, the film moves with the revelatory assuredness of a verite-style documentary offering privileged access to a secret world. Not until its final act does a more traditional drama emerge — the expulsion hearing for a violent student.
There are about 25 students, ages 14 to 15, in Francois’ class, and the film allows the personalities of a surprising number to emerge. Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani) is feisty and mouthy, somewhat smug in the way she disagrees with anyone when the mood strikes her, yet also bright enough to exhibit potential leadership.
Khoumba (Rachel Regulier), who oozes with unexplained resentment, demands to be left alone in class after a run-in with Francois. She even moves, without permission, to a desk in the rear to be out of his line of sight.
Arthur (Arthur Fogel) is the Goth kid, dressed in black with hair brushed into his eyes, who believes his look is a cry for individuality. Wei (Wei Huang) is a shy Asian kid, extremely smart but tentative about French language and grammar, who spends four hours a day with video games.
And Souleymane (Franck Keita), from the African country of Mali, is dangerously insolent, rocking back and forth in his chair, wearing sloppy sports clothing, angrily insulting other students and baiting his teacher: “People say you like men,” he tells Francois in class. He’s a fight waiting to happen, yet he has artistic talent and his pleasure when Francois puts his photographs on the wall is one of the film’s high points.
Francois’ activist, passionately involved teaching method is itself dramatic. He challenges the kids to participate and meets them head-on when they do or say something defiant, sometimes using humor and sometimes becoming angry. There’s nothing musty or old-fashioned about him; he’s not an out-of-touch authoritarian waiting to retire.
Yet, at the same time, he is neither sentimental about their potential nor overly reformist about their curriculum. Before they criticize the stress on grammar, he tells them they need first to master the subject. Otherwise, they are merely criticizing his authority as a teacher — and he won’t stand for that.
He’s also fallible — a flawed role model. The dramatic crisis that emerges toward the end of The Class is partially set off when he accuses two of his female students of “looking like skanks.” Compounding that mistake, he gets into a heated argument with the kids on the playground that almost erupts into a riot.
This crisis, which involves a threatened expulsion of Souleymane that might mean his father will send him back to impoverished Mali, might seem artificial to an American audience. Students are allowed to have two class representatives who sit in when faculty discuss end-of-year promotions to a higher grade. In this case, the two girls (one is Esmeralda) are way too immature for that duty; they betray confidentiality and report back to Souleymane that Francois called him “limited.” That creates an incident. (Francois, in actuality, was defending Souleymane to other faculty members.)
The film doesn’t really challenge the way this system works, even though it’s so obviously ludicrous and harmful in this instance. Maybe the French aren’t bothered by it, but I found that avoidance hard to overlook. As a result, I stayed just enough removed from the way the Souleymane problem plays out to be aware I was watching a movie, rather than being as fully transported into The Class’ world as I previously was.
It’s still a highly recommendable film, but one — like Francois, himself — with a flaw. Grade: B
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2009.