Spotlight: The Class

Hey movie lovers! I'm back from a brief hiatus to demand that you go see The Class at Angelika before it's too late. This movie is a truly rare wonder, so full of vitality and pure cinematic vision that it would be criminal to miss.

François Bégaudeau plays himself in this screen incarnation of his book Entre Les Murs, written about his experiences as a schoolteacher in a rough Parisian neighborhood. We follow him and his students--themselves played by real teenagers--through the ups and downs during one year at an ethnically diverse school in a country still plagued by very real racist sentiments. We become immersed in the world of the classroom and the teacher's lounge alike and, by virtue of Bégaudeau's writing and Laurent Cantet's eminently capable direction, experience their distinct pleasures and difficulties with an open-mindedness so consistent that these disparate worlds merge into a unified whole rarely seen onscreen or anywhere at all.

That The Class is not a documentary observation of real events witnessed on camera is nothing short of miraculous. Bégaudeau's moments of pure enthusiasm in his teaching, the sometimes heated exchanges between him and his students, and the dramas unfolding in and out of the classroom are so spontaneous and genuine--and Cantet's filmmaking so wonderfully transparent--that we have the sensation of watching quietly from the back of the room. The teenage students bring character and flair to their roles that are at once entertaining and unsettling, as they evoke a sense of what it feels like to be fourteen in the twenty-first century. François is remarkable as himself, and creates no illusions about his sincere desire to teach or the palpable frustration that must come with that passion.

The effortless realism of the characters makes their struggles all the more fascinating, and it is in these difficult situations that the movie transcends its fiction. A student with an attitude problem sinks further into trouble, François and his fellow teachers grapple with the difficulties inherent in student discipline, the home lives of children spill over into school, and the tensions between them all come to a head; in these and other crises of daily life The Class addresses the fundamental issues of education in a way that is nothing if not global and incisive. And all the while, the movie reveals the sins and the virtues of students and teachers with an equally objective precision that is truly shocking; during the final thirty minutes I had to completely reevaluate my frustration with the students and sympathy for their teacher, and could not have been more thrilled for it. 

In describing this movie to friends, I have told them that it is the single most honest, true-to-life, relevant, and important movie I can recall seeing, and I stand by that statement. The Class is a reminder of what the very best movies achieve: they hold a mirror to reality, grab onto you with memorable characters you can't forget, and force you to reevaluate the things that are right in front of you. If you see a movie in the near future, see The Class while it's still on the big screen, and be glad that you have had the chance.