Review of The Class (2008) by Edith N — 02 Dec 2010

Understanding, the Other Great Theme.

I talk a lot about obsession, but that's because a lot of movies are about obsession. We could compile a list, and indeed it might be interesting to do so. If you stop and think about it, most of the Greatest Movies Ever Made are about someone's obsession about something. Or someone. But the other thing movies tend to focus on is the need to understand someone or something, and that's what we have here. And perhaps the most interesting thing about this particular story of empathy is that, at the end, a lot of people are still left not understanding one another. Or even just realizing that they never did and may never do so. The question, at the end, is "How can you sit in a classroom for nine months and not learn anything?" What, perhaps, we know is that it's not just a question to be asked of the students.

François Marin (François Bégaudeau) teaches French to a class full of immigrants from around the world. We know that there is at least one student from Mali, one from Morocco, one from China, one from somewhere in the Caribbean. Of course, some may also actually have been born in France, though most of the class seems to be of at least African descent, if not birth. At any rate, this kids are in general bad students, in general troublemakers, and in general uninterested in learning, oh, the imperfect subjunctive. (They are not alone in this, though I learned it and find it important.) Marin holds really very little discipline over his class, and everyone concerned knows it. Several of the students, notably Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani) and Souleyman (Franck Keïta), seem almost intentionally giving him a hard time, almost as though they're playing Break the Teacher, that fine old school game.

It is worth noting that Franck Keïta is practically unique among the cast in that he is playing a character with a different name from his. You will also note, if you search the cast, that this is the only credit for most of them. All of this is because these kids were not actors before making this movie. They went to a workshop before the filming so that they could get the hang of speaking lines in front of a camera. Before that, they were pretty much just students at the school where this was filmed. It is to their credit that they all come across as so natural. Oh, I know--people will tell you that they come across as natural because they weren't actors going in, but that's not my experience. In my experience, people acting for the first time are more self-conscious than people who have been acting for a long time.

Marin is clearly trying to Make a Difference. However, it is equally clear that he has very little in the way of common experience with his students. When Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) tells him that Souleyman's father will send him back to Mali if he gets expelled, it is something which has clearly never even crossed Marin's mind. When he is writing a demonstration sentence, the name he uses is Bill, because he thinks it's a common name. His students, however, think it's weird. They don't know anyone named Bill. Even pointing out that a recent US President was named Bill didn't help. One of the students asks him what "snob" means. He finds out that his definition of "skank" is radically different from theirs, making something he said casually into a much bigger deal than he had intended it to be. (Actually, he said "[i]petasse[/i]," but I'm given to understand that "skank" is a decent translation.) And it seems to astonish him.

Usually, this sort of movie ends with students and teacher having some moment of bonding over a book or a poet or even just a common cause. At the end of the movie, everyone has Learned a Valuable Lesson, and it isn't just what a quatrain is. Marin has the kids write self-portraits midway through, and I think they are all too shallow for him to learn anything out of them. Which, you know, probably balances with the fact that the students don't even know why he wanted them to write a self-portrait in the first place. All they see is where he is callow and passionate, and that is all he sees of them. There are clues the whole way through that Esmeralda is smarter than he gives her credit for, but he never sees them. Similarly, she only sees when he criticizes them, and she never hears his compliments or his defending students even in meetings where she's sitting right there. We know, at the end, that he realizes how distant he is from his students' lives. What we don't know is if he will do anything about it--or if they see it as a chance to expand their own horizons, not just his.