The Class

It would be quite easy to mistake the recent Palme D’Or winning drama, The Class, for a documentary. Its story of classroom challenges comes straight from a teacher who has experienced this all first hand, the performances of teachers and students alike are pitch-perfect, genuine and rich, and the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style of filmmaking (recalling something of Mike Leigh or even last year’s French hit The Secret of the Grain) is perfectly appropriate for capturing the tedium of modern teaching. Essentially, the film simply charts one teacher’s futile attempts to reach a class of mixed-race 14 year-olds in inner-city Paris. Beyond that, however, it offers a commentary on the universal challenges involved in education everywhere, particularly in this era of globalisation.

Francois Begaudeau, the teacher who wrote the book on which this film is based, plays Mr Marin. His sincere attempts to educate this class (and to reach the smarter students amongst the group) are continuously thwarted, mainly by student ‘insolence,’ and those many, mind-numbing, endlessly cyclical conversations that consume classroom time and teacher attention. For the most part, the film is simply a document of these struggles, though it reaches a sort of climax after tempers flare in the classroom and one student’s future education is put on the line. At times, the film does drag a little, but this only contributes to its slowly-building impact. In the end, this film’s effect will take you by surprise, when you realise the magnitude of the crisis. For those who have recently been high school students, The Class offers almost humorous in its familiarity. For those in education, it offers a complex picture of the problems that need to be overcome, without offering any simple solution. For all others, this is a rich classroom drama to remedy the simplicity of Dangerous Minds, and especially the more recent, Freedom Writers.