The Class (***3/4)

This is, and isn’t, another movie about an idealistic young teacher trying to lift up a bunch of high school kids in a tough neighborhood. Mr. Marin won’t remind you of Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds, Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, Hillary Swank in Freedom Writers, and so on. Movies like that suggest that with a little tough love and a tough-but compassionate teacher, even poor kids in rough neighborhoods can all succeed. Even if we accept this as true, it’s also the case that there aren’t enough of these superhero teachers to go around. The Class, the story of a non-superhero, is based on a book by François Bégaudeau, a teacher who more or less plays himself in this drama directed by Laurent Cantet (Time Out, Human Resources).

Mr. Marin will probably seem more familiar than the superheroes, even if you didn’t go to school in a poor, multi-ethnic, Paris suburb. He’s the sort of teacher you might’ve thought was a good guy when you had him, then mostly forgotten about after that. He’s a well-meaning liberal who tries harder than most of his colleagues to engage the students, but still gets tripped up from time to time, reminded by the students that no matter how hip he tries to be that he is not one of them. The students are a mixture of types and ethnicities, including Arab and African immigrants and one awkward Chinese kid. It’s a small picture of a racial and social dynamic that’s a little bit different than in the United States, but like Mr. Marin we only get part of the story. Everything that happens is entirely within the school walls, so what we see is nothing more than the teacher does. (Nor do we learn anything about the teacher’s personal life.)

Cantet takes a somewhat detached approach to his characters—the film is like a documentary—but that works well here because it highlights the process as much as the characters. That is, we see the way the teacher is fighting a thousand tiny battles to hold the attention and respect of these students, who sometimes see through his strategies, and sometimes are too busy arguing with one another to notice what he’s doing. There are no great moments of uplift, or great defeat either (although the end has the suggestion of both). Heavy plotting there is not. But this cast of amateurs still had me amused, angry at them, feeling sorry for them, identifying with their boredom, and generally riveted.

IMDB link

viewed 2/14/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/16/09