Review of “The Class”
We hear much about the challenges of teaching on the front-line of inner city government schools – trying to engage the hearts and minds of the Millennials (those children born in the ten years before the year 2000), and their special way of skimming across life and navigating the disintegrated multi-cultural social spaces we have created. The Class (Entre Les Murs or “between the walls” in French) is a compelling account of one teacher’s approach to learning and connecting with his students, a group of ethnically diverse 14-year-olds who are part adult, part infant, and dealing with a range of their own personal and social issues. The film won the Palm d’Or at Cannes last year, the first French Film to take out this prestigious prize in twenty years.
In 2006, French literature teacher Francois Begaudeau wrote a semi-autobiographical account of his teaching experiences in Paris and not only has he helped adapt the book for the screen, but he also plays a version of himself as the films’ main character – Francois Marin. He is a calm and thoughtful man, a teacher who carefully rides the boundaries of decorum in order to challenge and coax a group of young people into the waters of literature. Amongst the class is the moody and silent Souleymane (Franck Keita) a boy from Mali who refuses to write, and the frustrated Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) who refuses to read. Despite taunts and invasions of privacy, Marin maintains a carefully balanced and informal respect with the group, never letting them get away with laziness or basic standards of social interaction, but also trying to befriend them as a way of drawing them out. But when let down by two of the girls - who are class representatives on the Academic Committee - Marin momentarily let’s his emotions take hold and the incident escalates to a crisis in the classroom. We watch as Marin tries to steer a path through the ensuing disciplinary proceedings – always with his students’ best interests forefront.
Director Laurent Cantet worked with Begaudeau and a group of school children at his school for a year, developing the story and then playing it out in a low-budget, multi-camera shoot. The results are so truthful and engaging that you feel part of the class, sitting at a desk in the room as the events slowly unfold and find deeply resonant emotional connections. It has a loose and naturalistic documentary feel, and says much about the complexities of the schooling process, about the limits of making hard rules, and about the kind of equality that has to underpin not only good teaching, but being a good human.
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