Dir. Laurent Cantet, France, 2008, 130 mins, French with subtitles
Cast: François Bégaudeau, Franck Keita
Review by Carol Allen
This film, which won the Palme D'Or at Cannes last year and was nominated for the best foreign film Oscar this year, fits into no known genre. It's based on a book by schoolteacher François Bégaudeau, which recorded in detail one year in the life of the Paris equivalent of a comprehensive or high school, where he was working. The idea was then taken up by director Cantet, who worked with Bégaudeau and his students in workshops, developing the book into a semi-improvised but structured scenario and then a film. Though this has the feel of a documentary both in its shooting style and casting, with the students playing students, Bégaudeau and his colleagues as the staff and also featuring some of the students' real parents as themselves, it is a structured, augmented and fictionalised version of the characters and events reported in Bégaudeau's book. And it is totally gripping.
The centre of the film is Bégaudeau and his class, a tough, stroppy, multi-ethnic group, mainly Arab, African and Caribbean with one Chinese boy. They are constantly arguing amongst themselves and with their teacher. Bégaudeau himself has an idiosyncratic style of teaching – tough to match his class but responsive, humorous and bluntly outspoken. Austria for example he describes as a tiny country which could vanish from the planet and no-one would notice – which might upset the Austrians – while later in the film he finds himself under fire for using strong language to two of his female pupils. The dominant class characters soon emerge – Esméralda and Khoumba among the girls, Carl, a new student, who's been expelled from his previous school and most prominently the disruptive Souleymane (Keita), around whom the initially episodic story eventually revolves, as his behaviour reaches a point where he too is threatened with expulsion – an event, if it happens, which will probably mean his being sent back to his parents' village in Africa.
The Class is both entertaining and educational in itself, an innovative and exciting new form for cinema and a real eye opener for those of us who've had little to do with the education system since leaving school. Both students and teachers at some of our own tough, inner-city schools however will find plenty of things to identify with amongst the students and teachers of The Class.
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