An unrelenting reflection of the tensions, trials and tussles of a group of junior school students, Laurence Cantet’s The Class combines a measured account of the social dynamics of the inner-city classroom with a startling loyalty to the reality of the school system.
Set in what the production notes describe as a ‘multi-cultural Parisian school’ (read ‘deprived, with the wider racial tensions of French society imposed on a miniature scale), The Class succeeds, where so many ‘inspirational’ American tales fail, because the students are real students, the parents real parents, even the teacher, played by Francois Begaudeau, is a real teacher (the film having been based on his bestselling auto-biographical novel Entre les Murs). Individuals are not manipulated into plot points; they instead afford the film an unswerving sense of honesty.
In a similar vein, our gaze never veers outside of the school grounds. The only glimpse of the outside world comes when Souleymane, a disruptive pupil whose frustration at school soon takes a turn for the worse, exhibits pictures of his family and friends in front of the class, or when Wei, a Chinese student who finds it difficult to interact with his classmates, reads out his ‘self-portrait.
This is not to say that The Class avoids the social issues that dog any ‘multi-cultural school’, quite the opposite. It expertly forces the audience into an awareness of the socio-political climate that shape the lives of these students, working to distil so much context into a manageable frame without simply reducing any characters into ciphers, or even worse, caricatures. The result is a film that genuinely questions our assumptions about the role of the school in a ‘liberal democracy’, offering a vision of the modern system of education that is, to say the very least, unsettling.
On its release in 1995 the French cabinet commissioned a special screening of La Haine to give them some idea of the crisis that had led to the rioting in the banlieues; likewise, in 2003, immediately after the occupation of Iraq, the Pentagon offered a screening of The Battle of Algiers to any personnel interested in the problem of guerrilla insurgency and ideological conflict. It is this reviewer’s opinion that Ed Balls would do well to take an hour or two out of his busy schedule to watch The Class, it is essential viewing.
5 stars
