Moviegoers who think they've seen every rowdy high school picture will think otherwise after watching "The Class," which won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
In this one, like it or not, you virtually participate in an exhausting year at Dolto, a cold-looking school in a low-income, multicultural Paris arrondissement (district). Making up the group are about two dozen noisy teenagers of various nationalities. Their instructor is a slender man who, by the time summer arrives, looks like he's ready to float his resume.
The guy's name is Francois Begaudeau, and he's an actual teacher who wrote a book entitled "Entre les murs" (Between the Walls), which is where most of the action unfolds. The movie brings his book to the screen and, in fact, he plays himself, trying to maintain peace and sanity in front of fellow Frenchman Laurent Cantet's camera.
Rated: PG-13 for language
Cast: Francois Begaudeau, Franck Keita, Nassim Amrabt
Director: Laurent Cantet
Run time: 128 minutes (in French with English subtitles)
A couple of times, one person charges another with being "overly dramatic," or something similarly worded. The very nature of "The Class" is drama of the most real kind: It looks like documentary until you realize what a good actor Begaudeau is. So are several of the young people who keep interrupting him with so much insolence that by the middle of a semester he's throwing his own insults back at them. They let him know they don't appreciate it, either.
As someone who has been teaching at different levels for more than 40 years, I find it hard to be objective about someone else's classroom strategies. Some of the things Begaudeau tries succeed with some students, and some things fail abysmally with others. He seems to be more in control of his group in autumn than he is in springtime.
A few present him with challenges he neither expects nor is ready to meet. A moody African girl named Khoumba convinces him respect is a two-way street, but also makes him feel like a fool. A Chinese student named Wei is intelligent but uncertain about his future after his mother is arrested for immigration irregularities.
Begaudeau thinks he has solved some of the academic problems experienced by Souleymane, a particularly stubborn kid from Mali. But when the teacher gets him to open up his personal emotions, the young man grows openly rebellious.
Some scenes in "The Class" generate white-knuckle intensity without sinking into violence, but the potential is always there, especially when we see student representatives taking notes while faculty grade the behavior of their peers.
There probably are French figures of speech that correspond to "can of worms" or "Pandora's box." Either would be appropriate for what the school system creates in "The Class," but neither would diminish the dramatic force of this outstanding film.
E-mail the author of this story: email@example.com