The Class

Few subgenres of cinema are more susceptible to clichés and stereotypes than the "inspirational teacher" movie. Such stories almost always feature a big moment at the end where the score swells up and the teacher makes a speech that will alter the course of the students' lives. There is also the plotline about a bad kid headed down a destructive path who is taken under the teacher's wing as a sort of pet project. And you can usually count on a stereotypical depiction of minorities, which allows for a simplistic perspective on the complexities of the racial divide. With all of that in mind, French filmmaker Laurent Cantet's bare-bones movie The Class deserves some attention for resisting the urge to include every predictable cliché on the list. But even while the movie stands out in a crowd of similarly themed movies, it never fully rises to the top due to its stifling lack of narrative imagination.

Winner of the 2008 Palme D'Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, The Class is a fly-on-the-wall account of the happenings in a single French class over the course of a school year. The majority of students in this particular school are a challenging group that tend to reject all instances of formal education. This creates great difficulties for the teachers of the school, who are constantly at wit's end, struggling to find a way to break through and provide something of substance to these unwilling young minds.

We are introduced to the entire faculty at the beginning of the movie, but The Class is specifically focused on Francois, a young man who has been teaching French at this school for a few years already. Francois is well aware of how difficult many of the students can be and so he decides to task each kid with penning their own self-portrait, in hopes of inspiring them to open up in the class. This assignment carries on throughout the movie and proves to be an effectively economic way to develop the students as characters within the walls of the classroom. Considering that the movie is just a series of scenes in which teachers and students interact with each other in various ways, the use of the self-portrait is a good way to provide the audience with an understanding of the characters, while also causing each of the characters in the movie to engage with each other on a personal level.

The self-portrait assignment is a smart idea, but beyond this one aspect of the plot, the script has very little to offer. The story meanders without any semblance of a convincing chronological framework and the narrative refuses to explore any avenues that exist outside the expected subplots of a movie about school. There is a slightly refreshing attitude at work here, but the script insists on being stuck in neutral, where it can make the same observations over and over again until the credits roll.

While the movie avoids some of the most obvious pitfalls of the "inspirational teacher" subgenre, it ultimately has nothing to say and nowhere to go, which prevents the story from ever making a solid emotional impact. Eventually, one troublemaker student goes too far and his subsequent punishment becomes a focal point of the movie near the end. This particular development is very predictable and simply reinforces the notion that the story is coming to a dead end.

The plot may be lifeless, but what saves the movie from its narrative doldrums is the cast. The most inspired decision made by Cantet was to go after real kids instead of young actors. Even Francois Begaudeau (who co-wrote the script based on his own book about his own experiences and plays the main teacher in the movie) is not a trained actor. The result is a completely believable group of people trapped in a room together as their personalities clash. Even as some of the kids are hampered by stereotypes, the performances make them come to life in a naturalistic way.

The camera also plays an interesting role in the movie. Once it enters the school in the first few seconds of the movie, it is locked in that space. It is free to roam the hallways and to venture outside, but it's fly-on-the-wall status is strictly confined to the school grounds. This means that, with the exception of a brief moment at the beginning, the entire movie takes place within the school. Everything we know about these characters is connected to their life at school. The camera often feels as though it is eavesdropping on life in the classroom and this lends additional authenticity to the proceedings.

The Class is an interesting movie and an honourable attempt to put a new spin on a worn subgenre. Cantet aims to revolutionize the "inspirational teacher" movie, but he only makes it halfway to his destination. The acting is excellent and the main reason to see this movie, but the dull and unimpressive script holds the movie back from becoming something truly great. This is a far more memorable movie than a lot of previous entries in this subgenre, because The Class feels raw and real. But despite everything it has going for it, the movie eventually runs out of steam and becomes very repetitive, offering the same scenes, the same thoughts, and the same conflicts. I applaud Laurent Cantet for trying to bring a refreshing perspective to a story about life in a classroom, but in the end, I am left feeling very little in the way of positive or negative emotions, stuck decidedly and disappointingly in the middle.