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The Class
Laurent Cantet's The Class focuses on a year in the lives of a multiethnic Parisian secondary school, and avoids every classroom film cliché by kilometers. Moreover, The Class is the first film I have ever seen successfully generate sympathy for a social system, a feat all the more unusual because Cantet defies most conventions of film narrative in the process.
Cantet directs from a screenplay by François Bégaudeau – adapting his own book – who also appears in the film as François Marin, the French teacher of the titular class. The film is shot in a naturalistic, documentary style with several handheld digital cameras covering the action in each lesson, largely improvised by Bégaudeau and the brilliant cast of young nonprofessional actors. Cantet cuts around the classroom from close-up to close-up, capturing exquisitely observed moments of the students' often inattentive behavior during the lessons. The students are vibrant characters, and various plot strands arise from their interactions with each other and Marin. Some of the plot lines pay off; a classroom altercation results in a disciplinary hearing and expulsion for one child, while others disappear into the ether like so many real conflicts – for example, the argument between Marin and Khoumba (Rachel Régulier) appears to be forgotten as quickly as it begins. Although loosely plotted, The Class is not especially episodic. The arc of one complete school year gives the film enough structure, and Cantet moves swiftly from scene to scene with few signposts to denote passage of time.
These and other naturalistic touches spread the audience's identification among teachers and students, thereby making the school itself something of a protagonist. Cantet, Bégaudeau, and the cast of teachers reflect many of the school's organizational politics, and present the teachers as a diverse group of civil servants with no greater nobility than their students. Teachers, administrators, and parents move through The Class, all ostensibly making good-faith efforts on the students' behalf, but many fall short. Marin's relatively uncomplicated French class is overwhelmingly complicated by the multiracial, multilingual group of teenage students who grapple with questions of personal and national identity in addition to the usual teenage existential dramas. The audience's sympathy moves frequently from one character to another, but most often, it lies with a system that is intelligently designed and run with pure motives by capable people, yet still doomed to fail at least part of the time. Although it is clear that the school is not working for some of its students, Cantet never tells us whom to blame.
The Class is filled with risky formal choices that succeed by defying narrative convention. With so many characters entering and exiting the story at all times, Marin is the closest the film comes to a single protagonist, and yet Cantet and Bégaudeau reveal almost nothing about his life outside the classroom. The absence of clear transitions to denote passage of time actually raises the stakes of the teachers' every missed opportunity. And the film's proliferation of story threads forces the audience to stop thinking of action in terms of a plot or preparation for subsequent events. The life of the school therefore becomes unpredictable, realistic, and all the more engaging for it.
The Class is a near perfect fusion of form and content, consistently engaging on both dramatic and intellectual levels. It demands and rewards attentive viewership, and audiences expecting Dead Poets Society or Dangerous Minds should be pleasantly surprised to find something radically different and altogether original.
Stuart Weinstock
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