Entre les murs (The Class)

Likely the most memorable event this year at the Cannes Film Festival wasn't the return of Indiana Jones but the swarms of wide-eyed teens who rushed the stage to accept the festival's biggest nod for The Class (Entre les murs), a fresh-faced look at the daily travails of François Marin, a Parisian high-school teacher. Although the title, in French, suggests imprisonment, the school is anything but. The windows of this classroom are thrown wide open and a breeze is allowed to circulate as we (re)discover new truths. Filmmaker Laurent Cantet (Heading South) adapted The Class from a novel written by real-life educator François Bégaudeau. "The movie that we wanted to make had to resemble French society, had to be multifaceted, a bit teeming, complex, and had to sometimes portray frictions that the film didn't try to erase," the filmmaker said.

Who thought a roomful of hardened students could be so interesting? Shot in documentary style, The Class gives a true-to-life picture of a troubled Parisian high school where diffidence is the norm and discourse among the faculty leads to divisiveness. One of the premises of The Class seems to be that the French school system is a self-fulfilling failure. Students' reticence to go along leads to teachers make concessions, thereby cheapening the learning experience. Could be true, right? When students question his pedagogical style, the often surly but sometimes genial François (Bégaudeau) takes them head-on, and verbal jousting follows happy banter to often fascinating effect. Is this fiction or reality? The students are dumbfounded by François' honesty. To deepen the effect, Cantet turns the one-dimensional student cliché on its head: Bégaudeau catches Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani) in the act of reading Plato's Republic in class, he is surprised that the same pupil who earlier jeered at the outmoded verb tenses written on the blackboard would be reading the classics on her own.

Since the traditional system can no longer prevail over these students, are new methods of discipline appropriate? And how far can teachers go? Bégaudeau isn't sure. When a student faces expulsion, Bégaudeau flip-flops between authoritativeness and compassion.

By comparison, his students seem more consistent in rejecting just about everything French - tiptoeing around proper Français for the more street-oriented racaille. The whys and hows of their dismissal can be difficult to fathom. After all, France has had an open-door policy toward immigration for generations. The families of students Souleymane, Khoumba and Wei escaped war-torn countries and grueling economic conditions back home but, like so many young immigrants living in France, they feel alienated. Subtly, Cantet allows ideas like poverty, race and immigration to seep through these classroom walls.

Souleymane (Frank Keita) reminds us of the bully we all knew when we were growing up. A terse confrontation ensues after François notices Souleymane isn't paying attention to the lesson. The student shows off a tattooed quote on his left shoulder which says, "Unless you speak the truth, be quiet." This is directed to the teacher himself, we understand, but Bégaudeau confronts Souleymane with typical irony: "If your doodling could sound as interesting as this...." Moments later, a fight breaks out and someone gets hurt.

Souleymane, during a tense meeting with his mother, teacher and the school principal, appears more docile, and his bravado slowly disintegrates under his mother's dark stare. Unless he softens his act, he faces expulsion from school, which means he would be shipped back to his father's village in Mali. The stakes are high in the classroom, Cantet reminds us. And yet it seems perpetually on the verge of complete collapse; nowhere in this classroom is law and order a de facto policy. A lecture might be interrupted by a scuffle, the teacher might walk out of the class in disgust, or names will be named and retributions expected.

With The Class, emotions inside a classroom take on a heft we didn't see coming. A fault-prone teacher and true-to-life students become endeared to us.

As the Festival de Cannes got underway, jury president Sean Penn had said the filmmaker who would win the Palme d'Or would have to be someone who "is very aware of the times in which he or she lives." This couldn't ring truer of Cantet, and The Class left Cannes with the festival's most prized award.

Photos copyright Georgi Lazarevski.

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