The Class Gets An A

Thinking back on middle school, one can’t help but wonder how any person is able to evolve past the awkward, unpleasant struggles of adolescence to become confused, identity obsessed high-school and college students. Yet one has only to compare yearbook pictures to realize it happens all around the world. French director Laurent Cantent and teacher/writer Francois Begaudeau seem to have been especially taken by this ungraceful period, as it is the focus of their 2008 film, The Class (Entre les murs), which won the Palme d’Or, the highest award given at the Cannes Film Festival, and is showing all this week at Vinegar Hill Theatre on the downtown mall.

The film is based on Begaudeau’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, which concerns his experiences as a middle school teacher in an inner city Paris public school. Over the course of the year Francois clashes with unruly, unmotivated students, overbearing or uninterested parents, faculty politics, his own temper, and a genuine desire to see his students succeed in life.

The major strengths of The Class lie in its superb acting, particularly by the students, and in the unromantic yet still gripping depiction of the innermost workings of a school. Shot in a documentary style but very much fictionalized, Cantent takes a hyperrealistic narrative approach, in which virtually every shot and scene is set up to function exactly as it would in a normal academic setting. There isn’t even a score to detract from the idea that we are observing a real classroom in action. Cantent pushes this technique to the extremes, and if edited differently, it is not unlikely that an audience would think it were watching real teachers and students.

Francois’s classroom is a veritable melting pot of cultures, personalities, and conflicting ideas that manifest themselves within each individual student. There is a model Asian student with immigrant parents who run into legal trouble, a rebellious Malian student with little regard for authority or respect for his classmates, and chatty, sarcastic females who seem only to desire to make Francois’s life more difficult. Each child actor delivers outstanding performances that combine into an all-encompassing rendering of adolescent attitudes. Francois’s heated lectures and unorthodox teaching style give way to tangents that verge on outright social commentary, as well as many condemnations of the public educational system.

Perhaps one of the most telling moments of the film occurs during parent/teacher conferences, when the parents of each student have very personal conversations with Francois. Without much effort, we can tell how each parent’s attitude concerning education has affected their child’s performance, and despite the students’ absence, we can easily match the pupils to the adults. Their concerns about high schools, careers, motivations, and their children’s development, as well as the multiculturalism and variety of backgrounds that comprise his class spark some of the greatest dialogue the film has to offer.

Francois himself is a character that an audience can easily identify and sympathize with. In a position of authority, yet with compassion for his students, we see the development of Francois’s internal struggle concerning his own role with his classroom. Through his handling of discipline, we begin to see that Francois has a serious empathy and care for every single one of his students, and that their defiance truly effects him personally. He brings his emotions into the classroom, and openly discusses controversial topics like homosexuality while treating his students as equals. This causes problems down the road, however, as his looseness of language offends some of his students and causes a climactic conflict with his more outspoken pupils.

Cantent does an outstanding job delivering a view of a classroom setting that is universal and true to life without ever being boring or bogged down by insignificant details. Although focusing on some of the minute activities that occur in a classroom might seem pointless at first, the narrative exposes more of the personality of every student, as well as shedding more light on their complex relationships with Francois through their interactions. This classroom is a place of discussion that reveals a diverse nation quite frequently overlooked as homogeneous, and Cantent and Begaudeau do an absolutely superb job debunking this stereotype in an emotionally charged, easily relatable film.

The Class plays at Vinegar Hill Theater until April 10.