February 15, 2009: The Class (Entre les Murs)
I try to see “teacher movies” with my wife, who is a schoolteacher, and indeed I was able to convince her to see this one, with its Rottentomatoes.com rating in the mid-90s, Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-language Film (the entry from France), and the fact that it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2008. The Class is about teachers, and specifically one teacher in a school in a culturally diverse urban Paris neighbourhood, through the course of a school year. It is based on a semi-autobiographical book.
The featured teacher runs his classroom in a more relaxed style than many, trying to show some respect for the students. In teaching his Literature class, the group has frank discussions about a wide variety of topics, which is suitable as the students try to relate their experiences to those of characters in books. If the subject were math or science, such discussion would be out of place. They talk about personal relationships, race relations, class differences, and prejudices and their impact on society. The kids bring valuable viewpoints to the discussions, since they live with these issues every day. Unfortunately, this permissive discussion style can backfire on our intrepid teacher, as he is eventually provoked to a point where he asserts his authority with an insensitive remark about one of the girls, and suddenly the camaraderie he thought he had built with his students flies out the window as they band together to gang up on him in the aftermath. One of the students, who might stereotypically appear to be a troublemaker and does live up to that stereotype to a point, is set up as the fall guy in the incident. Everyone, for their part, struggles with whether this one student’s fate should be sacrificed for the greater good of keeping a well-meaning teacher in place. Is this simply the price to be paid for living in the time and place they are in?
This is a film I wished was in a language I fluently understood, because the layered discussions with people talking over one another can never be completely captured in subtitles, and I’m sure some of the nuance of the film was lost on me. Even so, this was a disarmingly fresh approach to the teacher movie concept, and the fact that it used real students to play the students in the film brought an often-missing authenticity to the proceedings, and almost a documentary feel. The Class deserves the accolades lauded upon it. I haven’t made a habit in the past of focusing on Cannes winners, but certainly the Palme d’Or winners I know I’ve seen have been more consistently excellent than Best Picture Oscar winners. See this one.
Excellent teacher movie reinvents the genre.
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