By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.3 cats
Director: Laurent Cantet
Starring: Boubacar Touré | Carl Nanor | Esmèralda Ouertani | Franck Keita | François Bégaudeau | Louise Grinberg | Rachel Régulier | Wei Huang
Original language title: Entre les Murs
Country: france
Year: 2009
Running time: 128
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1068646/
Bruce says: “Laurent Cantet burst on the scene with the admirable first effort, HUMAN RESOURCES. His next films, TIME OUT and HEADING SOUTH, proved that he is on an upward trajectory. THE CLASS, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a wonderfully unbiased look at the travails of a schoolteacher and the struggles and fears of the students in his class. The film is based on the memoirs of François Bégaudeau who essentially plays himself in the film. The students are all non-professional actors; some are Arab, some Asian, some of undetermined backgrounds. To some extent hey play themselves, yet some of the film is pure fiction. This blending of documentary and narrative filmmaking is all the vogue right now. Chinese director Jia Zhangke is doing similarly effective work.
“Bégaudeau plays M. Marin, an uncommonly gifted teacher who, unless pushed beyond reasonable limits, maintains his cool under the most stressful classroom situations. The students are smart-assed, recalcitrant, mean-spirited, shiftless and self-involved. There is an occasional bright moment when one student appears grateful or another finally masters a hard-to-grasp concept. Most of the time, the classroom is a battlefield. The good responses are, ‘Sir, why are you criticizing me?’ or, ‘No one talks to me like that.’ Often no one in the class has done the homework and Marin frequently gets no volunteers when he poses a question. Punishment has no effect on the students.
“From time to time the camera leaves the classroom to catch some schoolyard action or document a staff meeting. Most of the teachers treat their work as just another job, the occasional one going off on a rant when his grip on sanity is loosened a bit. The first half of the film is clearly mood setting – there is a total absence of plot. Marin asks his students to write self portraits describing their feelings, not just listing milestones or historical facts. This exercise is effective because it is ultimately non-threatening. But success for Marin does not come easily, even then.
“An unfortunate incident unfolds that involves several students. Two girls who were made classroom representatives in a disciplinary hearing, return to the classroom and reveal to the rest of the class what was agreed to be kept secret. When Marin refers to their behavior as skanky, some of the class is outraged. One student gets injured and one is threatened with dismissal. The film ends with a hearing that will determine his fate.
“The strengths of the film begin with Cantet’s relentlessly non-judgmental approach to his subject matter. The viewer is in no way directed one way or another, an astonishing achievement considering the complex environment lends itself to sociologically positioning oneself on the side of the teacher or on the side of the students. The classroom camerawork is astounding and the children are as real and natural as any teen actors could possibly be. The minor weaknesses are: there is depth lacking in most of the characters (realistically, it is not always possible to accomplish everything in a single film); and some of the scenes seem fragmented, some tossed in just because they were available, not because they fit. In spite of its length, the film holds the viewer’s attention remarkably well. 4.5 cats
“THE CLASS screened at the 2008 New York Film Festival.”
Jason says: “THE CLASS does seem somewhat different from conventional teacher/student movies from the beginning, but it takes a while before the biggest reason why sinks in. Usually, the subject of a movie is exceptional in some way – that’s why you make movies about them in particular. It’s not until about midway through that the audience begins to realize what director Laurent Cantet is doing – not telling the story of a great teacher, or even an especially good one, but an average teacher.
“That teacher is François Marin; he teaches French in a middle school that serves an ethnically diverse but not particularly prosperous section of Paris. He’s been around long enough to be a class supervisor and not to feel the need to announce his service time when the faculty has their meet-and-greet at the start of the school year. Some of the students in the particular class that we follow have had him before; some are new. There’s smart-aleck Esmerelda, who wants to be a cop when she grows up; Wey, a Chinese immigrant whose French is still a little rough; Khoumba, who has grown standoffish and angry over the summer; Louise, a class representative (along with Esmerelda); Soulemayne, a Malian boy who is disruptive when he does show up to class; and Carl, who transfers in after being expelled from another school. They are not especially gifted kids, but it’s not a remedial class.
“We follow Marin and his students over the course of a school year, from the first class to the last, with teacher meetings, parent/teacher conferences, and disciplinary hearings along the way. Cantet gives the film a documentary feel without ever specifically using documentary devices: There are no staged interviews or acknowledgment of the camera, no informational subtitles. There are cuts and close-ups within scenes that indicate multiple takes. On the other hand, it does have the “available footage” feel of a documentary; storylines dangle unresolved or happen off-screen. Amusing or instructive scenes that don’t have much to do with anything else are thrown in. The plot develops late and is clearly subservient to giving us a look at this environment; much of the pleasure of THE CLASS is, fittingly, that of learning something new rather than a story well-told.
“Further blurring the line between narrative and documentary is the cast. M. Marin is played by François Bégaudeau, who worked on adapting the screenplay from his own book about his experiences as a teacher. As the credits scroll, one sees that the characters names match those of the actors; I would not be shocked if either the actual students from Bégaudeau’s book were playing themselves, the cast was mainly amateurs instructed to just be themselves, or Cantet changed the character names to facilitate improvisation. Whatever the reason, the result is engrossing; we almost never see telltale signs of an actor performing. I suspect several cast member must be a ringers – Franck Keïta as Soulemayne, for instance, not just from the differing names but because they’re too central to the last act to leave anything to chance – but it’s almost impossible to tell with any certainty.
“That Bégaudeau is playing, essentially, a version of himself makes the film’s honesty somewhat surprising. It’s not that the film neither indicts nor praises French public education – as with just about every story about teachers ever made, the system is shown as short of resources and having a hard time adapting to the day’s youth. Though we’re prepared early on to sympathize with M. Marin – he’s contrasted against a less empathetic teacher and always argues benefit to the student over convenience to the faculty – it eventually becomes clear that he’s pretty darn flawed: He can be confrontational and unwilling to admit that he’s wrong. Most of the audience can likely pinpoint the exact moment when things get out of hand in the last act, and it can be laid squarely at his feet. Not solely – from that point forward, nobody comes out looking particularly righteous, and there’s an extraneous bit of melodrama – but it’s a shocking moment for the audience: Films about teachers have that mistake in the first act, not the last, and for a semi-autobiographical story, it’s far from self-serving.
“It doesn’t make him into the villain of the piece, but the last act is a dash of cold water on what we’re used to. It’s a sobering thought, that even the dedicated teachers have blind spots and failures. Stories about those teachers and students probaby tell us more about the problems (and what works) with public schools than the inspirational ones.
4.5 cats
“A couple notes from after the review that sort of take the wind out of what I wrote: According to the synopsis of the original book I found on Amazon, the original book is more roman-a-clef than non-fiction. I viewed the film under the impression that François Bégaudeau was a career teacher, when in fact it appears that he was a movie critic and novelist who (briefly?) taught a French as a second language class. I don’t think that changes my evaluation of the quality of the movie that much, although I guess it makes my musings on it as a quasi-documentary seem a little silly, though I’m leaving them in, as they do represent my thoughts on the movie after seeing it.”
Beth Caldwell says: “I thought this film was well made. Excellent characters, good cinematography. I think the film maker did a lot with a rather subtle story line. Especially well conceived was the teacher’s multilayered emotional character. Neither a hero, nor tragic figure, he is allowed to be more than the formulaic urban school teacher often portrayed in these types of films. 4 cats”