The Class

The Class feels like an assignment that requires serious concentration. This French film won the top prize last year at Cannes and competes for the Foreign Film Oscar Sunday night. The Class opens in an exclusive engagement at the River Oaks Three this weekend.
Imagine To Sir With Love but where the teacher embodies the same son of a bitch tendencies as the students. The Class (Entre les murs) doesn't tread the path of Hollywood school themed films, there's no glint of Stand and Deliver or Dangerous Minds. As directed by Laurent Cantet the action vacillates back and forth as a contest of wills between Mr. Marin and his students. The story unwinds with the in-your-face mood of a documentary and there's a reason why. Cantet shot the film throughout the span of a school semester using the author of its source material (François Bégaudeau) as the teacher and wisely casting a diverse group of teens to play the students.
Although the central Paris setting with an ethnic range of students gives added subtext to the simplicity of the story (the French title translates as Between the Walls) you can imagine the story itself unfolding in any metropolitan city. At first the script seems like a series of vignettes strung together set in the same class but the dialogue carries that thought a step further. The individual scenes are long and talky but reveal nuances of all the characters. A shorter number of scenes are set in the teacher's lounge and conference room. The Class captures the short depth of confined spaces in keeping with its confrontational moods.
As the semester progresses the drama gets specific and we focus on whether one Asian student's mom being deported affects his learning curve or the disciplinary action taken against another student from Africa. At the same time everyone has grown or more correctly achieved an arc. Mr. Marin actually gets quite testy towards the end. When he calls one obnoxious girl a "skank" the drama escalates to new heights. The Class never overwhelmed me but I had to respect what the director was saying about education and about people. Fortunately there's no quiz at the end.