Review: Entre les murs (2008)
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If it wasn’t for the irresistible rags-to-riches appeal of Slumdog Millionaire, Laurent Cantet’s masterfully understated classroom drama The Class might well have won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
The thoughtful, dialogue-driven narrative is at once quintessentially French and undeniably global. Disenfranchised inner-city teenagers and despairing teachers are common features of urban life everywhere, after all. But rarely have they been depicted with such poetic candour and stereotype-free characterisation.
This documentary-style film has an edgy grace that leaves the audience with both a sense of despair and a glint of optimism about those harbingers of middle-class angst: working-class teenagers. “Most films about adolescents show them as monosyllabic,” says scriptwriter François Bégaudeau. “For us, the dominant force is the loquacious and lively adolescent, rather than melancholic and inhibited.”
The cast
Played by lay actors from a high school in the 20th arrondissement, a poor Parisian borough, The Class represents a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual microcosm of French society. Teachers, pupils and parents alike are entangled in constant conflicts that threaten to undermine respect, motivation and friendship on all sides.
Teacher François Marin, played by Bégaudeau, is entrusted with a disparate group of budding personalities, ranging from the studious to the delinquent, the violent to the meek. Marin’s informal yet firm teaching style is met with both enthusiasm and suspicion. Insisting on respect, honesty and politeness, Marin struggles with the obstinacy and gangster allures of his more aggressive pupils, yet sporadically succeeds in engaging them in the curriculum.
Lost and found: social and cultural identity
Most of Marin’s students come from immigrant backgrounds. Yearning for a sense of belonging that French society denies them, they find comfort in patriotism for the countries their parents left behind. Emotions run high during the African Nations Cup, when pupils become engrossed in the support for their various countries of origin. Pupils take pride in their knowledge of rap lyrics, native languages and the Koran and boast to each other about trips ‘back home’.
Relations between teachers and parents are tense. Some parents hardly speak French and rely on their children to translate at parent-teacher conferences. French parents complain that their children are being held back by the slow pace of foreign pupils.
Language is at the centre of the narrative, culminating in a fall-out between Marin and his class over the interpretation of a single word spoken in anger. Thankfully, the film stops short of lamenting the imagined deficits or idealising the supposed genius of teenage usage.
Reality suffused with fiction
Improvisation was key to the film’s many poignant performances and the actors, most of which appear under their real names, never had a script in hand. Cantet gave his amateur cast the freedom to infuse their roles with elements of their own identity as well as completely fictional character traits.
Permeated by an authenticity that may well stem from Cantet’s spontaneous production process, The Class is powerful in an entirely unassuming manner. It is the kind of story that seems to meander aimlessly, but eventually captures your imagination when you least expect it; the kind of film that stays with you long after you have left the cinema.
