London,

The Class

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Dir: Ilmar Raag.

 

2007. 97mins

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Important lesson in The Class

 

Learning curve: director Laurent Cantet uses real pupils— many from impoverished, immigrant backgrounds — and teachers to chronicle a year in their lives at school

Guiding light: François Bégaudeau is a teacher trying to be both mentor and friend to his pupils

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Those wary of spending two hours in front of a teacher should also beware missing one of the best European films of the year. The teacher in question attempts to educate a class of unruly French teenagers at least as bad as you’d find in London, and, in the process, delivers a perceptive lesson on a vital subject. 

It was, admittedly, a surprise when Sean Penn and his jury gave Laurent Cantet’s The Class the big prize at Cannes last year but a second viewing confirms that they were not just rewarding, as often is the case, social and cultural relevance above cinematic skill.

This may not be Cantet’s most extraordinary film (surely it was Time Out, about an unemployed man who lies to his family about it for years) but his adaptation of François Bégaudeau’s autobiographical novel is as intriguing as any good documentary would be.

It is also as important, since its subject matter transcends all national boundaries and is as appropriate to our education system as it is to that of France. There are, however, things about this class that do make you think France is a little different. The pupils, even the recalcitrant and surly members of the class, seem more politically aware than our lot and determined to show teacher how their lives are very different from his.

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“You just want to buy social harmony,” a colleague tells Bégaudeau, the sometimes successful but often flailing teacher turned writer, daringly cast as himself. “You think you’ve tamed me,” a member of his class accuses, later on. The fact that this teacher isn’t always right is what makes this film so compelling.

At one point he calls the two most lippy pupils, including an Arab girl (Esmeralda Ourtani, who unexpectedly reveals that she has read Plato’s Republic in her own time), “skanks”. That means prostitutes in their terms if not in his, and they report him for being insulting.

Leading up to that episode, Franck Keita’s Souleymane, the son of Malian immigrants who wears a “God is great” tattoo on his arm, causes a classroom crisis by challenging the teacher with barely suppressed rage when refusing to read out a short essay on his own life. As this follows several such incidents, the boy’s illiterate, non-French-speaking mother is summoned with him to a meeting to discuss his possible expulsion. She is faithfully translated, word for word, by her son, who, she says hopefully, has always been good at home.

But it’s too late — he will have to find another school, though the headmaster will try to help him with that. As mother and son walk out of the room, there is a palpable sense of us against them.

The film never strays from classroom and school, which is of the inner-city variety, drawing its multi-racial pupils from mostly poor Parisian families, and Bégaudeau’s fictionalised version of himself is taken from weekly workshops, improvised sequences and a shoot that lasted a full academic year.

Clearly, he wants to be seen as much as a friend as a teacher and sometimes achieves that, as with one bashful and hard-working Chinese pupil who first has to learn French. But at other times when Bégaudeau thinks he’s won his students over, they push him back. He is he and they are they — and the finer points of the French language, which he is meant to be teaching, mean little or nothing to them.

The Class is blessed with a gathering strength and power of expression. It is funny on occasions though not like Ken Loach’s Kes, another classic school film, in its humour or its essential polemic.

Cantet and Bégaudeau obviously know what they are talking about, however, and the natural performances, so good as to be hardly performances at all, show it.

To say this is an important film would perhaps be offputting — but it is, and please don’t be offput.

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