I saw “The Class” last night and thought it was extremely good. Not “Milk” or “Waltz with Bashir” good, mind you, but good. The film is a pseudo-documentary set at a Paris junior high school, and portrays the tensions that arise as a young French teacher, François Marin (played adroitly by François Bégaudeau, the author of the book on which the movie is based) and his colleagues try to navigate the realities of a multi-ethnic student body being fed a standard issue French curriculum.
The issue the film deals with is how to engage students who believe that the lessons being taught are not relevant to them, either because they are about French topics and therefore deemed not applicable or even discriminatory by the students of non-French extraction, or because the students believe them to be temporally irrelevant. “Who speaks that way? Nobody.” is the retort Marin receives as he tries to impart the finer points of the French grammar to his students.
Much of the film could be written off as fairly standard stuff–disaffected teens who think it’s more important to act cool than to focus on the work at hand have been the stuff of too many films to count since Blackboard Jungle first graced cinemas in 1955. But that would be missing the point. “The Class” moves well beyond simple disaffection to a debate about the role of teaching a single culture in state schools populated by kids from elsewhere; it also delves reasonably deeply into the teachers’ own prejudices and how they try to combat them with varying degrees of success.
Through it all run multiple threads on the appropriate structure of power: Two students–as is their right as class reps–sit in on the teachers’ discussion of how all the other students are doing and the actions that need to be taken with those who are struggling. This inevitably undercuts the teachers’ authority in an explosive manner, begging the obvious question of why they need to be there in the first place. The power of the School/State looms throughout, but especially so in the case of one student who, it is said, will be sent back to Mali if he is expelled, and another whose mother is deported to China.
For me (SPOILER ALERT) the end of the movie was something of a letdown, but I’m not sure it will hit everyone the same way. Expulsion of the most problematic student brings a renewed calm to the class and students appear to re-engage in the lessons offered. One student, Esmeralda, even notes she’d read Plato on her own; while this can be seen as a continuation of her in-your-face insistence on her independence, the smile on Marin’s face suggests he has won. The final shot focuses on a football match involving teachers and the kids; one could see it as a metaphor for an ongoing power struggle at the school, but combined with the other bits, it all seems a little too nice. The message is less an unclear “life goes on” than a suggestion that removing the bad seeds is the answer.
