Let’s be frank: the movie industry needs another white-teacher-inspires-racially-diverse-class flick like Suge Knight needs another fried Twinkie. Perhaps, then, the astonishing appeal of Laurent Cantet’s The Class—which was released in France last year and opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema—lies in how it avoids the heavy-handed preaching of its classroom ilk, offering an understated, nuanced glimpse into the world of student-teacher interaction.
The film is based on the novel Entre les Murs (Between the Walls) by teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau. Like the students, administrators, and other teachers in the film, Bégaudeau plays a fictionalized version of himself, starring as an ambitious yet startlingly frank teacher (also named François) working at a high school in a rough-necked Parisian neighborhood. Virtually every cast member was pulled from the same high school in a blue-collar suburb of Paris, and it’s easy to forget that these people are actually acting—13-year-olds fiddle with their cell phones with an air of ease and regularity, utterly oblivious to the cameras around them; faculty gripe and moan about a faulty coffee machine as if their next 15-minute break depended on it. (It probably did.)
While The Class—which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film—is not a full-on documentary, its natural casting choices and simple camera shots with handheld recorders gives it a candid, impromptu feel. Aesthetically, the film is incredibly sparse; not a single note of music is heard over the two-hour runtime, and the cinematography amounts to little more than close-up shots of students and administrators awash in harsh institutional light.
While it will likely alienate fidgety viewers, the film’s quiet, subdued tone proves to be its greatest strength. Though François’ students maintain a pretty constant racket while class is in session, the film allows for several powerful moments of silence which reveal just as much about its characters: an extended shot of François pursing his lips over a student incident report speaks volumes about the teacher’s zealous dedication without uttering a single word.
The movie’s plot develops almost exclusively within the Spartan, whitewashed confines of the school (hence, “between the walls”), a sort of insular universe which plays host to a near-constant dialectic between François and his rambunctious ninth-graders. From the teacher’s first discussion with his students, it’s clear that The Class is more than just a trite story of a starry-eyed teacher learning to deal with a racially mixed class of hormone-crazed teenagers. The two sides jostle with ideas about the importance of language to social and national identity (one sassy girl accuses François of teaching “bourgeois” speech), the need to balance punishment with encouragement, and the idea of what it means to be French in a city where immigrants’ identities are as plain as the national team soccer jerseys on their backs.
The beauty of The Class is how it lets its themes emerge slowly from the revealing dialogue, rather than force-feeding them to the audience. The film presents a snapshot spanning an entire year of schooling; as such, it doesn’t force student-teacher interactions into a rigid plot arc, but rather lets them unfold naturally, leaving it to the audience to pick up the pieces and assemble something meaningful for themselves.
Like any good open-ended conversation, you’re never quite sure where The Class will end up. The film’s final scene consists of two extended shots of the vacant classroom. The first fixates on the blackboard; the second on the desks where the students sat, where it lingers for a couple seconds. Filtered through Cantet’s artistic lens, education is a two-way road rather than a unidirectional flow of knowledge; educators often learn just as much from their students—however deviant or seemingly unmotivated—as their young subjects learn from the stuffy pedagogue hovering down in front.
