The Class (Entre les murs)

It’s time to start mentioning Laurent Cantet among the great directors working today. Winner of the highest award at Cannes last year and rapturously received at the NY Film Festival, this film follows the impressive string of Human Resources (1999), Time Out (2001), and Heading South (2005). Each of his films is tuned into social and economic realities, but with The Class (which might also have been called The Classes, or better yet, the original title, Between the Walls), his quasi-documentary approach yields unassailable truth. Francois Begaudeau wrote a memoir of a year teaching in a Parisian middle school, then worked with Cantet on a script based on his experiences, and finally plays a semi-fictionalized version of himself, over the course of a year with a classroom of real students, though not the original subjects. The other teachers and parents are also “real.” Filming with three HD cameras, Cantet captures the verite of public schooling better than anyone since Frederick Wiseman. But the real amazement is how entertaining and involving the proceedings become; out of the boredom of the classroom a portrait of a volatile multicultural society emerges. There are tensions between the African and Caribbean Blacks, between the Arabs and those who proclaim a French identity, between the academically eager Chinese and the immigration authorities. This pot is bubbling but not melting. No summary of “plot” or character will clue you into the experience of this film, you must take it all in on the fly, like a fly on the wall. My point of comparison would be the superlative fourth season of The Wire, telling the hard truth about the education of marginal youths, without bludgeoning the viewer into despair. (2008, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-92.)