Hollywood hues
Class apart

Laurent Cantet’s The Class, which won the Golden Palm last year, is a must-see
for lovers of good, serious cinema, writes Ervell E. Menezes

FILMS on teacher-student relationships keep cropping up periodically with growing intensity. The gap is obviously widening and if Goodbye Mr Chipps (Peter O’Toole) was reasonably mild the rift widened with Up the Down Staircase, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Dead Poet’s Society. The Class is the latest in the line and this a Golden Palm winner and fittingly a dialogue-heavy movie which enters the psyche of the viewer to keep him absorbed right its 125 minute duration and leaving him totally cathartic when the curtain comes down.

A former secondary school teacher turned novelist Francois Begaudeau was an educator in an inner-city school in a tough Paris neighbourhood. The memoir Between the Walls provided the inspiration for French filmmaker Laurent Cantet to make this low-budget, documentary style drama. It depicts the power struggles between teacher and students during a whole academic year but it is quite bereft of the sentimental teacher-student romance.

It is hard-as-nails stuff on the French education system as seen from different perspectives and author Begaudeau makes his acting debut as Francois Merin in the lead role and high-definition video cameras bring us within breathing distance of Merin and his unruly students who only vary in their degree of insolence. The classroom is a microcosm of the world with its various pulls and pressures. There’s a sassy Arab girl Khoumba (Rachel Regulier) who refuses to read from The Diary of Anne Frank because she feels victimised by the teacher. Then there’s Sandra (Esmeralda Ouertani) for his racist attitude in the class. As the year progresses, tension builds up with Mali student Souleymane (Franck Keita) being downright insolent and even violent in his behaviour to Merin. It is a handpicked bunch of no-gooders but Merin tries his best to understand them.

The teachers’ meetings also provide a varied view of their points of view and early on when one of them, about to leave the school, tells Merin "I’d like to offer my new colleague a lot of courage." It is discerning, serious drama with an innovative screenplay by Begaudeau and Cantet. Cinematographer Pierre Milon too stays up close to the characters with most of the action shot indoors. It may have some seemingly racist overtones but it is essentially humanist. Telling performances by a group of amateurs adds up the overall effect and director Cantet can well be proud of it — a must-see for lovers of good, serious cinema.

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