Reviews: The Class

Here are two reviews of "The Class," written by Cosmo Landesman in the Sunday (London) Times and Philip French in The Guardian.

In the week when University Challenge gave us a new brain of Britain, Gail Trimble, to admire,along comes The Class, a realistic look at life in a rough, multicultural secondary school in Paris that challenges the pedagogic assumptions that produced Trimble and other successful students of the classics. It’s a film that starts with the hope of a new term and ends a year later with the sad admission of failure. “I learnt nothing this year,” says a young black student.

Stylistically, The Class is a curious hybrid. Directed by Laurent Cantet, it is based on a book by François Bégaudeau about his time as a teacher. Cantet workshopped the piece with non-professional teenagers, and actual teachers and parents, to produce a docu-like drama, with Bégaudeau as a fictional version of himself. And the performances from the non-actors are quite remarkable. But, please, sir, may I ask a question? Just as photography made a kind of naturalistic painting redundant, hasn’t reality television made reality-based fiction redundant too? Why fake a fly-on-the-wall style when you can shoot a fly-on-the-wall documentary that will be as good as any drama?

Still, there’s no denying The Class is a distinguished work that breaks with the traditions of the pedagogic pic. This is no uplifting tale of an idealistic teacher who, through sheer perseverance, finally reaches his disruptive class and shows them the wonders of knowledge and the joys of learning. It’s a dispatch from the front line of any urban school in western Europe.

We first see Monsieur Marin (Bégaudeau) sipping coffee, as if bracing himself to face another year. Once inside the classroom, we can see why: his is a daily struggle to keep his 14- and 15-year-olds calm, quiet and interested enough to be taught. He handles this unruly lot with a mix of encouragement, exasperation, Socratic probing and gentle sarcasm. Marin is neither a stuffy traditionalist nor a down-with-the-kids trendy. He believes in discipline and classroom etiquette, but wants his pupils to feel free to speak their mind. This can be problematic, as when one of his pupils, Souleymane (Franck Keïta), duly speaks his mind and asks him if it is true that he is gay.

What the film captures better than any other school film is the everyday reality — the social dynamics and cultural conflicts — of the modern classroom. Marin’s students constantly disrupt the learning process with questions that throw him off track. Two of his mouthiest malcontents are Khoumba (Rachel Régulier) and her sidekick, Esméralda (Esméralda Ouertani). They are mini-monsters, smart when it comes to pushing a teacher’s buttons. They ask for definitions of words; they question the raison d’être for elements of grammar; and, most of all, they challenge his sense of himself as culturally sensitive.

They want to know why, when giving examples, he always uses white names such as Bill, instead of African or Arab names. His self-evidently inadequate reply that going down that route “would never end” suggests he is the one with the closed mind.

The film takes its time to build up the drama, preferring a slow accumulation of small conflicts and incidents. Cantet wants us to see the good, bad and ugly sides of the classroom, and creates a constant dramatic tension between the didactic and the disruptive. He knows these kids can drive their teachers nuts or explode in anger at any point. It’s a fascinating study of how a dedicated teacher’s character — his ability to stay cool in the face of routine provocation — is challenged every time he enters the classroom.

The film raises important questions about learning, authority and discipline, and is honest enough to admit that it doesn’t really have any answers. The trouble is, it seems to think there’s plenty of real learning going on somewhere in that room. But Marin’s class is like a large therapy session in which the kids can learn about themselves. This becomes most obvious when they are given The Diary of Anne Frank to read — not as part of their Holocaust studies, but to inspire them to pen self-portraits.

The Class likes to think it moves from the observational to the dramatic without interposing moral judgments or taking sides. Clearly, it doesn’t want to be one of those scary Hollywood flicks about the horrors of the urban school. Yet it offers a more frightening look at modern education than anything Hollywood cooks up. If you think the plus side of what goes on here outweighs the negative, ask yourself: would you want your child to be in this class? Of course not. Now, here’s the really scary and depressing part: many of our children are already in classes like this one.

Laurent Cantet emerged on the world scene as a French director in the Ken Loach tradition with his first feature, Human Resources, in 2000. Using a non-professional cast, it dealt with matters of class and industrial relations through the story of a high-flying academic coming as a business trainee to a provincial factory where his middle-aged father works on the production line.

His second film, Time Out (2001), centred on a middle-rank executive who can't bring himself to tell his family he's been made redundant. His next film, Heading South (2005), took him in a slightly different direction and used three prominent actresses to play well-heeled American women visiting Haiti as sex tourists. Again, the themes were deception, self-deception and the confrontation of difficult truths.

For his fourth feature, The Class, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, he's reverted to a non-professional cast in adapting Entre les murs, a novel by François Bégaudeau. Like writers as varied as Evelyn Waugh (Decline and Fall) and Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle), Bégaudeau has turned his teaching experiences into fiction and he himself plays a "prof" at a tough, racially mixed, inner-city school in Paris. There's a remarkable French tradition of school films, extending from Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite to Nicolas Philibert's Etre et avoir. Cantet, whose parents were both teachers, carries it on and he elicits marvellous performances from a cast who are, we're assured, not merely playing versions of themselves.

The film covers an academic year, beginning with the teachers gathering for the autumn term, introducing themselves to each other and being welcomed by the principal, an unsmiling figure wearing rimless glasses. It ends with an informal soccer match between staff and pupils and a long-held shot of an empty classroom, its blackboard pristine once more.

The camera never leaves the school. We just see the staff room, the claustrophobic playground (rather like a prison exercise yard), the principal's office, a conference room, and the classroom where François Marin (Bégaudeau) is form tutor and teaches French to a mixed group of 14- and 15-year-olds. We're shown nothing of the homes of staff and pupils and we never see what the school offers by way of a library, laboratories or sports facilities.

In a taut, hand-held, documentary-style fashion, the film concentrates on Marin as he tries to keep order in the class, mediating between conflicting ethnic groups, damping down the irreverently vociferous, bringing out the reticent and trying to educate them. How in God's name, many will think, can a teacher continue day after day in this brutal theatre of apathy and aggression? At one point, a new teacher comes into the staff room on the point of a breakdown, complaining about the impossibility of doing anything with these "animals". A colleague takes him outside for a "breath of fresh air", which seems to do the trick.

Marin's class is not an immediately endearing collection. They're querulous and quarrelsome and in some ways the brightest are the most disruptive and obstreperous. When he teaches them the complexities and subtleties of French verbs and tenses, they challenge the need to know such things. People don't talk like that, they say, which is amusing in a depressing way. He gives them The Diary of Anne Frank to study as a prelude to understanding and expressing themselves by writing self-portraits. But none of them bothers to read it and one of the smartest pupils, the near-nihilistic Tunisian teenager Esmeralda, says she can't be bothered with books. But Marin persists and they all end up writing something revealing and then visit the computer room to turn the texts into attractively produced folders.

Marin's big success comes when he gets the withdrawn, unco-operative, inarticulate Souleymane, a tall, handsome pupil from Mali, to develop his gift for photography and make his self-portrait a fully illustrated family history. But Souleymane also becomes his biggest failure when he's taken to the principal's office for the second time after a confused act of violence in class. Will the result be expulsion and his possible return to a village in Mali? This provides an involving vein of suspense that runs through the second half of the film.

We learn nothing of Marin's life outside the classroom other than his claim - when challenged by a confused, homophobic pupil during a classroom discussion - that he isn't gay. In this non-judgmental film, the audience is left to do the judging and the film is certainly a testing experience for someone of my generation reared in schools where strict decorum and severe discipline were the unvarying norm.

Neither weary cynic nor wide-eyed idealistic, Marin is a decent, determined realist, a Sisyphus of the schoolroom, pushing his boulder up the hill every day and occasionally getting to stay at the top overnight. He isn't one of those triumphalist Hollywood heroes who inspires a class of unruly Hispanic maths pupils from the barrio to get maths scholarships to UCLA and MIT, or persuades a generation of special students to worship dead poets. He tries to understand the boys and girls and when the parents visit him to discuss their children's progress we begin to understand with him the range of homes from which they come.

At one point, Marin loses his rag and calls the provocative Esmeralda and her collusive friend "pétasses", a term the Larousse Dictionnaire de l'argot defines as "femme vulgaire; prostituée debútante ou occasionnelle", and which the subtitles translate as "skank". The girls play up this insult for all its worth. They launch a vindictive campaign to destroy him and foolishly he engages them in the playground, provoking a second slanging match.

Fortunately, the matter is more intelligently dealt with than a similar incident in a BBC green room might have been. Marin is not a saint, though by the end of the school year he has exhibited certain of the necessary qualities.