Film Review: 'Class' a lesson for society

Photo by Pierre Milon/Sony Pictures Classics, Pierre Milon/Sony Pictures Classics

''The Class'' is based on the book by Franois Bégaudeau, who portrays the teacher.

Winner of the top prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and the second Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee to arrive in Memphis in two weeks, "The Class" is a remarkable work that depicts a year in the life of an inner-city middle-school classroom with clarity, sympathy and heartbreaking realism: The performers in the movie are actual teachers and students, enacting slightly fictionalized versions of themselves for director Laurent Cantet's cameras.

Photo by Pierre Milon/Sony Pictures Classics

''The Class'' is based on the book by Franois Bégaudeau, who portrays the teacher.

The film was shot as if it were a documentary. Cantet covered almost every scene with three handheld cameras: One to record the teacher; one for the others who were important to the scene; and a third for the incidental activity in the classroom.

Although the almost nonstop talk is French, the setting is Paris and the ethnic diversity may seem "exotic" to Memphis viewers (Arab and African immigrants share classroom space with Europeans and Asians), anyone who's ever spent any time in a classroom -- and isn't that pretty much all of us? -- will immediately recognize the teacher-pupil dynamic examined here.

There's the playful procrastinating of the students; the paradoxical desire of the students to be both praised and ignored; and the frustration of the teacher, who is forced to spend more time on discipline than instruction, while also being required to be aware of the insecurities and sensitivities of the physically mature children in his temporary care.

"The Class" is based on an autobiographical novel by Franois Bégaudeau, who is credited with the script and who essentially plays himself onscreen. Apparently, the personalities of the students and the film's loose narrative -- the story occasionally focuses on a troublemaker from Mali -- were in part developed during woodshedding sessions with Bégaudeau, the students and Cantet. The result is like a Palme d'Or-worthy episode of "Room 222," but without any of the easy resolution typically found in episodic television or in such inspirational classroom movies as "Dangerous Minds" and "Freedom Writers."

The classroom becomes symbolic of society as a whole: An incubator of problems as well as solutions, and a source of disaster and promise, hope and despair, affection and enmity.

"The Class" is at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

-- John Beifuss, 529-2394

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