On Screen

French director Laurent Cantet has a history of making films that
blur the line and mine the tension between documentary and drama. His
1999 film Ressources Humaines (Human Resources) was shot
on location at a French factory with nonactor factory workers playing
the leads. His latest film, the Palme d’Or–winning Entre Les
Murs (The Class), continues even further in this vein. Its
star, François Bégaudeau, who plays a teacher named
François, is a former teacher himself (and sometime film critic
for Cahiers du Cinema), whose semiautobiographical novel
provides the rough inspiration for the film. The ensemble cast is made
up of actual students and teachers, and the scenes are largely
improvised, with three digital video cameras watching, such that
François’ interrogations of and interactions with his students
not only reflect but in fact replicate the real give and take of a
classroom.

The film follows François and his class from the beginning to
the end of an entire school year. At first, the pace is gradual and
episodic, documenting the day-to-day struggles of the classroom.
Eventually, a central conflict emerges in the form of a troubled and
disruptive African immigrant student.

But the loose plot exists chiefly to allow Cantet to examine the
mechanics of the school as institution and social organism. Cantet
shows us scenes we’ve all seen a thousand times before—the
classroom, the faculty meeting, the parent-teacher conference, the
visit to the principal’s office—but he unearths from them nuanced
explorations of how authority figures and their subjects, driven by
complex and often conflicting interests, negotiate power and
responsibility.

Mercifully, François is not a one-dimensional hero-teacher,
nor are his students merely dangerous but ultimately redeemable minds
for him to reach out and touch. François enjoys and takes
seriously his responsibility to his students (that confluence is
apparent in, say, a scene in which he artfully handles a student asking
him if he’s gay), but he is far from infallible; the students are
preoccupied with their outsized internal adolescent lives, but they are
not necessarily uneager to learn.

Throughout, Bégaudeau and the cast are consistently
genuine—one scene doesn’t seem obviously scripted and another
documented or improvised, for instance—and the performances as a
whole are impressive.

The Class would be a notable work if only for the process
behind it, but, to its credit, it also happens to be a remarkable
film.