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 In cinemas Thursday Jan 22 [M]
Director: Laurent Cantet
Runtime: 128 mins
Being a kid in high school might be tough, but being a high school teacher is tougher. This might not have always been the case, but as countless movies have shown us over the past 20 years, kids just keep getting harder and harder to control – let alone teach. In Laurent Cantet’s latest film, The Class, we’re introduced to French teacher François Bégaudeau (playing himself) and his class of unruly, ethnically diverse fifteen year-olds (also playing themselves) in a working class suburb of Paris. And what may outwardly seem like yet another ‘beleaguered teacher’ film is revealed as a thoroughly engrossing, gritty and ultimately charming portrayal of contemporary teacher-student relationships.
Based on Bégaudeau’s book, and shot in a hand-held documentary style with little or no musical soundtrack, the experience of the film is one of total absorption in the class itself and, more broadly, the school in which it’s set. The prospect of a two hour film set almost entirely in a French high school class may seem, at best, exceedingly tedious, and at worst, a new height for French cinematic pretension. In reality, it is neither of these things. The apparently mundane goings on of the class somehow become of great interest and the film feels much shorter than its actual length.
This has much to do not only with the natural concern we feel for the protagonist, François, or the drama constantly aroused by his many troublesome students. It’s also a result of his eloquent and calculated responses to the awkward, often pointless questions with which he is constantly bombarded. While other teachers around him crack under the pressure, François – who seems to cop it worse than any of them – maintains poise and dignity, understanding that without these, all hope of being respected by his students, and hence any chance of actually educating them, will be lost.
When François does lose his temper, albeit briefly, a pair of especially vindictive teenage girls seize the opportunity to destroy him. Too immature to understand the potential outcomes of their actions, they come to represent the increasingly disaffected youth of the West. Even though they come from low income, working class backgrounds, they have it much better than most other kids in the world, yet still insist on disrupting an institution designed specifically to empower them.
It’s difficult to say much more without giving the story away – suffice to say the film moves unpredictably toward a surprising and immensely satisfying conclusion. If you’ve ever been a student or a teacher (or both), The Class is well worth two hours of your time.
****
ADAM DODD
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