Class Struggle

A look inside a gritty Paris high school illuminates the give-and-take between students and teacher.

by Sam Adams

TEACHER'S PET: François Bégaudeau (above) is the real-life inspiration for Laurent Cantet's improvised film about life in a rough-and-tumble Paris high school.

RECOMMENDED

Classroom debates have never been more thrilling than in Laurent Cantet's The Class. Shot in a gritty public high school on the outskirts of Paris, the film envisions the classroom as a battlefield where power struggles are in constant play. It's no accident that the film's French title, Entre les Murs (Within the Walls), could as easily apply to a prison as a school.

The classroom's nominal head is François, played by real-life teacher François Bégaudeau, whose nonfiction account of his experiences teaching at a similar school inspired the film. Bégaudeau had never acted before, but he's the closest thing to a professional among the film's principal cast. The classroom scenes were built up from improvisations, and among the on-screen cast, only Bégaudeau knew where they were supposed to go. Like a teacher, he tried to guide his students towards a pre-determined goal, and like teenagers, his students — all of whom were classmates at a single Paris school — often refused. The scenes were shot with three high-def video cameras, so as to capture as much continuous action as possible.

The material in the film is almost never the first take, but Cantet directed his young actors to preserve the energy of their initial reactions as they honed the newly created material through subsequent repetitions. As a result, the scenes have the electric crackle of improvisation without the shaggy edges. The confrontations between François and his students have the engrossing unpredictably of a great sporting match, one that pits experience against quick wits and cunning.

High school movies almost invariably condescend to their subjects. They're designed to teach children to learn what's good for them, to submit to authority as the price for entry into adult society. Occasionally, there's a token back-and-forth where the teacher learns some minor detail from her students, but for the most part, education is a one-way street. But François, for all his fiery determination, frequently, and sometimes grossly, underestimates his students, and when he does put his foot down, it's not always in the right place. When his students, many of whom are of African and Arab origins, shout out their objection to his use of a generic "Bill" in a sample sentence, he responds as if they're just trying to derail his lesson. But they're making a valid point, one that resonates outside the classroom's walls.

Cantet takes his time building to the movie's pivotal confrontation, which involves a hot-tempered African student named Souleymane (Franck Keïta) and a big-mouthed provocatrice named Sandra (Esmérelda Ouertani). What François doesn't see, and what we may not perceive at first, is that his students' first object of study is their teacher, and however much he may fancy himself to be one step ahead of them, they have an ice-cold read on how to push his buttons.

The way Sandra savors the chance to put François in the hot seat has shades of David Mamet's Oleanna, but unlike Mamet, Cantet isn't interested in power in the abstract. In his previous films, Time Out and Human Resources, and even in the misconceived Heading South, the focus is on the way power functions within a society, how it creates and warps it, and how the relationships it forms exert force in both directions. As François is molding his students, they are molding him.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Class | Directed by Laurent Cantet | A Sony Pictures Classics release | Opens Friday at Ritz Five