Review- The Class

Forget Glenn Ford and Blackboard Jungle, or any number of formulaic education dramas in which the superhero teacher triumphs over a corrupt system and challenging students. Leave it to the French to craft a movie that captures the energy, chaos and heartbreak of modern education. Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les Murs) is a miracle of rhetorical energy, capturing the tensions and irresolution of a polyglot society by seemingly recording the goings on in a single high school classroom.
Francois Marin (Francios Begaudeau, who also wrote the screenplay and the novel it is based on), is not particularly idealistic nor cynical. He wants to teach. He wants his students to have a voice. He wants a modicum of order in his class. The film charts the push-pull of identities and ideologies over the course of a single year.
Begaudeau is a teacher himself. And director Cantet captures the energy of his class by using real students playing themselves, and filming them in a “real” classroom situation. But the energy of the scenes rivals the best Hollywood action sequences. A marvel of editing, Cantet generates palpable empathy between his audience and the residents of the class. The stories that emerge—the troubled African immigrant who faces deportation, the cocky girl who wants to be a police officer—are all the more affecting because it feels like you’ve lived in the classroom right along with the students.
The Class offers no solutions. It doesn’t condemn the education system or the students. Its characters are by turns charming and insufferable. It artfully does what the best stories aspire to do: finds powerful, complicated and human connections between interesting, complicated people. And in that way, it shines as few recent moves have.