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Friday, March 13, 2009
Film / News A Class act
Posted By Matt Brunson on Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 12:02 PM
by Matt Brunson
THE CLASS
DIRECTED BY Laurent Cantent
STARS François Bégaudeau
Don't be embarrassed if you start watching The Class and can't figure out if it's a documentary or a fictional piece; that's doubtless the effect that director Laurent Cantent was hoping to achieve. Winner of the top prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival as well as an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, this French import is based on Entre les Murs (Between the Walls), a novel penned by schoolteacher François Bégaudeau. Bégaudeau co-wrote the script and plays himself in the movie, which is shot in cinema verité style by Cantent — add up all these facts and we're left with a fictionalized presentation that walks and talks like a documentary.
Set in a Paris high school, the movie follows Bégaudeau over the course of one year, sticking with him as he struggles to maintain his cool in the midst of so many openly hostile students. Certainly, there are plenty of good kids, but there are also some whose sole purpose on this planet seems to be to question authority.
That's hardly a new concept — teens have been testing the patience of their elders ever since the first professor drew a mark on the cave wall and a pupil argued its purpose — but what's particularly interesting about The Class is that there aren't always clear-cut delineations between "right" and "wrong" behavior: The students' frustrations are sometimes justified, and while Bégaudeau seems to have his heart in the right place, his ability to communicate often gets hampered by the limitations of the curriculum, the limitations of the teaching environment, and even by his own limitations as an instructor.
There's nothing particularly revelatory about the film — unless you happen to believe that the U.S. is the only country with an educational system in disarray — but it's a piercing look at a generation gap that only seems to be gaping ever more widely.
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