To Monsieur With Wariness

Not very far into Laurent Cantet’s The Class, there’s a scene in a junior high school’s teachers lounge during which a young, male, bushy-haired instructor bursts into the room and begins to loudly and bitterly unload. The students, he complains, are impossibly base and insubordinate, and impervious to teaching efforts. He’s had it, he proclaims. Finally, another young man calmly suggests they go outside together to get some air. The frustrated venter doesn’t quit.

This kind of scene could have been fitted into a number of American movies with an urban-education setting, going back 55 years to Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle. But this French film, which was a nominee for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, is quite unlike all those melodramatic domestic movies.

In its largely steady, mostly quiet fashion, it’s a surprisingly involving, highly unusual work. For one thing, it’s been co-adapted from his own novel by Francois Begaudeau, a former teacher who also plays the central character, who shares the author’s first name and is, presumably, a version of his creator. More importantly, the filmmakers have managed to persuasively recreate the practiced, mundane transactions of a classroom and its regular minor-key stress tests, as well as the occasional flareups of angry adolescent pushback—in particular, one ugly incident in which the irritably affronted Francois allows himself to be baited into using an injudicious and dangerous word.

More often, The Class concerns itself with the customary stuff of class sessions, and unexpectedly manages to make a credible, sometimes amusing, and eventually poignant narrative out of it. The school where Francois works is in the Twentieth Arrondissement of Paris, a district swelled by immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. The students’ families are tenuously working class and their racial and ethnic differences can be expressed in nasty personal insults and raillery over rival national soccer teams. Still, it’s worth nothing that, in a setting where some of the students call their teacher a “camemberter” to disdainfully and ethnically distinguish themselves from him, the class members often get along with him and each other.

Francois doggedly and deftly works his way into a provisional rapport with these charges, facing up to questions about his sexual orientation and challenges to the utility of the imperfect subjunctive tense. He uses a combination of cajolery and his rank to get them to read aloud and to discuss their lives. It can be easy to forget that Begaudeau is giving a performance, albeit one based on his own experiences. He’s a lean, pleasantly sharp-featured thirty-something, and he gives us a sense of his namesake’s personality and character without the aid of scripted details. The students, who were actual 14- and 15-year-old junior high enrollees, are equally impressive. Director Cantet has worked some small miracles.

The film often seems to be a documentary that is recording observations of real classroom activity, but if you concentrate, you may notice the artful editing and shot framing. There is a strong sense of compression; the novel must have provided a lot more biographical background and depiction of the school’s character. But, within the limiting ambit imposed by cinema, Cantet and his colleagues have brought off something virtually unknown in popular American moves: a dramatically engaging, honest portrayal of public school life, and the resoluteness and empathy teachers need to survive in it.