The last few years, I've seen a lot of movies about students in inner-city schools and the nave, but well-intentioned, teachers who come to inspire them. "Freedom Writers" comes to mind, starring Hillary Swank as a devoted English teacher who overcomes budget cuts, condescending colleagues, and surly attitudes to help her students reach heights thought unreachable. "Stand and Deliver" is another, focused on calculus instead of writing.
There are others, I'm sure, but they all have a common plot line: enthusiastic teacher starts school hoping to inspire high school students; high school students don't care and give him a hard time; one day the teacher makes a breakthrough; from then on, the students will walk through fire for him and everyone gets A's.
"The Class" hits almost none of the points on this checklist.
Yes, this French film based on an autobiographic book by François Bégaudeau does have a class of surly teenagers who really do not want to be learning the imperfect indicative, but so does every high school. What I found startling about "The Class" was not only the breadth of diversity in one classroom, but also the overwhelmingly honest picture it paints of the interactions of teachers with their students and with each other.
The movie opens with scenes of the teachers introducing themselves and the classes that they teach. The movie focuses on one class taught by François Marin. Marin is a young teacher, trying to be both the authority figure and a friend to these students who really don't want his help or his friendship.
The students represent virtually every part of the globe, from Africa, to the Middle East, to the Caribbean, and finally Asia. The students have trouble believing that Marin really cares about their struggles because he teaches them grammar structures like the "imperfect indicative" which they call "bourgeois."
Many of the students are fresh, especially Esmeralda and Souleymane, although in two totally different ways. Esmeralda (played by Esmeralda Ouertani) constantly challenges Marin's intentions, showing that she is smarter than she pretends to be. Souleymane, however, is the classic bad boy: he cuts class, doesn't do his homework, and his attitude suggests that he'd rather be anywhere but here.
As Marin tries to negotiate his way working with this class, we're reminded that he is only human. I think as students, we like to think that teachers have a plan and know exactly what they're doing. Marin shows us that he's fallible and knows about as much as his students do about negotiating the new multicultural identity of France.
His interactions with his fellow teachers show that they, too, are imperfect. In a especially poignant scene, one teacher stomps into the teacher's lounge raging against the students and their apathy. You can tell that he feels helpless against their indifference, especially since he is doing all that he can to reach out to them and draw them out. The teachers sit silent, letting him rant and letting us hear him rant. We're reminded of the challenges that teachers face, something for which we often refuse to give them credit.
Bégaudeau both contributed to the screenplay and played the part of the teacher, François Marin. Considering that Bégaudeau is a teacher by trade, his performance as an actor is exemplary. In fact, if I hadn't known that Bégaudeau was a teacher, I would have thought that he's some well-known French actor.
Likewise, all the teachers and the students were taken from the school that Bégaudeau teaches in (and wrote about). Playing themselves in front of a camera can't be easy, but the students pulled it off without making any of their anger, joy, discomfort, or pain seem forced.
The documentary style of the film added to it as well and made it appear more believable and realistic instead of looking like "High School Musical in France!"
I left the Eveningstar Cinema wondering if I liked the movie or not. At times, you think that Marin is an inspiring teacher, and at other times you find him too sarcastic and condescending and think that the students are right in mocking him.
It's these polarities however, that make Marin a wonderful character. He's not the heroic educator. Instead, he's the average teacher trying to figure out where he fits in this classroom.