The Class

Entre les murs

(France, 2008, 128 mins)

35mm

Canadian Premiere

Selected Filmography:  

PRODS: Carole Scotta, Caroline Benjo, Barbara Letellier, Simon Arnal
SCR: Laurent Cantet, François Bégaudeau, Robin Campillo
CAM: Pierre Milon, Catherine Pujol, Georgi Lazarevski
ED: Robin Campillo, Stéphanie Léger
Cast: François Bégaudeau, Esmeralda Ouetani, Franck Keita, Racjel Regulier, Wei Huang

Welcome to another year of French class; my name is François, and you are all skanks. Laurent Cantet's latest feature is based on a simple concept: go inside the walls of a tough, racially mixed Parisian high school in the 20th arrondissement, enter one contentious classroom for a year, and watch the fireworks. Based on the novel Entre les murs, a fictionalized version of the life of its author, teacher François Bégaudeau, The Class developed out of months of workshops and rehearsals. Shot on HD without a script, using three cameras at once--like filming a tennis match--this is a docudrama that feels completely real. For viewers, it's tantamount to enrolling in a riveting French immersion program.

An invigorating work of social commentary, The Class is most notable for being a look into the attitudes of a wide cultural range of the students--all are lively characters, but none of them are exactly "playing themselves." Their realistic interactions with Bégaudeau, who also "plays himself," are so in-depth that The Class is impossible to summarize in the traditional sense; the drama develops organically. Neither stuffy nor severe, Bégaudeau's frankness often takes his pupils by surprise. That is, until the students begin to challenge his unconventional take on the Socratic method: student clashes with student, teacher calls students skanks, students revolt... Almost uniformly lauded by critics of all stripes, The Class won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

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