Class Debate: Cantet's New Quasi-Documentary

Sara Ziff: Columbia students rarely tend to dare professors mid-lecture to pull down their pants. Unfortunately, François Bégaudeau, a former French teacher, never had the privilege of instructing a Columbia class. Director Laurent Cantet’s The Class, which is based on an autobiographical novel by Bégaudeau, chronicles the efforts of a well-intentioned teacher named Monsieur Marin (played by Bégaudeau) to instruct a diverse and unruly class of junior high school students in Paris.

And while the Palme d’Or-winning film tackles provocative questions of ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic conflict in the French classroom—a microcosm of France’s social unrest—it is the movie’s unique filmmaking process that really shines. Cantet cast real-life students and teachers from a Parisian school and the nonactors flesh out their characters through improvisation.

This quasi-documentary method yields a spontaneous classroom dynamic with a particularly memorable, natural performance from Souleymane, a thuggish North African who broods at his desk like a ticking time bomb. Cantet’s collaborative process with his cast is as free form as Marin’s interactive teaching method—rather than dictate lessons to his boisterous students, Martin piggybacks on their interjections to win their respect. Still, the many handheld shots of eye-rolling students become dizzying and monotonous, and with an unclear narrative, these subversive exchanges with Martin never sustain the movie.

Alexandra Symonds: There’s a lot about the film that seems designed to be deliberately alienating to the viewer—guerilla-style shots, the lack of music, a bizarre final sequence that pans over empty desks in a room. But what I found most off-putting was Marin himself. He’s casually misogynistic and often blurs the line of student-teacher appropriateness. Early in the film, for example, he attempts to identify with a male student by reassuring him that there’s nothing wrong with liking to look at cleavage.

The incident that finally sets off the bomb Sara mentioned—Souleymane’s final act of classroom disruption, which leads to his expulsion—is triggered by Marin’s comparison of two of his female students to “a couple of skanks.” It is often hard to identify with the guy, and I often found myself wondering how much the film was based on his experiences; the fact that Bégaudeau plays himself in the film version of the novel leads to a sort of meta-identity crisis.

Ziff: Marin is certainly no saint: he calls these two young women “skanks” and then tries to protect himself by keeping this from the principal. I think this deceit is really the nadir of his sometimes-questionable relationship with his students. It is the one time he completely abandons them in his persistent effort to connect.

Even more disturbing is a scene featuring a colleague who has a meltdown in the teacher’s lounge. “They are like animals!” he exclaims to the homogenous, white faculty, complaining about the multiethnic population of students. This scene takes the viewer beyond the drama of the movie, evoking the polarizing effect of French colonialism still felt today. The silence that follows—from the very people who are these kids’ educational lifeline—speaks volumes.

Symonds: Near the end of the film, one of the students who has been among Marin’s greatest antagonists surprises him by claiming that she learned nothing in school, but had read Plato’s Republic on her own time. When pressed, she gives a fairly accurate summary of the work, explaining that Socrates provokes his students in order to educate them.

The connection is obvious: Marin is a modern-day Socrates, out to make his students learn without letting them get comfortable. The problem is that he fails: during this same end-of-year exercise, students inevitably draw on what they’ve learned in other classes.

After the class has been dismissed for the final time, a shy girl hangs back to tell Marin she hasn’t learned anything at all—that the material has been over her head all year, and that she’s afraid she’ll be sent to vocational school. That platitudes are all Marin can offer her sums up the central frustration of viewing The Class—the moral dubiousness of what small resolutions it comes to.

While it certainly leaves viewers asking all the right questions—about technical innovation, social dynamics, the purpose of education—I think other films have done it better, such as Half Nelson. Ultimately, I left the theater feeling much like Bégaudeau’s shy student—for all the teacher’s effort, I’d learned nothing.