A Voice of Dissent on The Class

I have to dissent from the love-fest for The Class. Considering the raves from around the world, I may be alone.

The French film's "tomatometer" score on movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes is an astounding 97%, a higher rating than Oscar darling Slumdog Millionaire or any Best Picture winner of this decade. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes and Oscar-nominated, The Class has quickly become a can't-miss cinema event.

Director Laurent Cantet's film, based on teacher/author/actor François Bégaudeau's book, follows one rough year for a middle school teacher and his students in a working class, immigrant neighborhood outside Paris. The movie is earning praise for its cinéma vérité style, raw performances by non-actors, and absence of overtly didactic messaging. In short, it's the antithesis of every clichéd, teacher-as-savior movie that Hollywood has vomited onto the silver screen since 1955's Blackboard Jungle. (I have a soft spot for Glenn Ford, but let's not forget the lunacy there: he ultimately wins over his students by accepting an invitation to a mid-class knife fight with Vic Morrow.)

Note: This movie review contains spoilers.

The Class may be a watchable, stark departure from other schoolhouse flicks, but its stripped-down stylization and "gritty" subject matter is scoring it a free pass from serious consideration of the startling hollowness of its narrative.

An illusion of authenticity is not enough to sustain a dramatic film. I have no doubt that every exchange that fourth-year French teacher M. Marin experiences with his students and colleagues has been replicated countless times in schools across the world. Yet individual, reality-inspired moments do not a substantive movie make. Two hours of a wholly authentic, closed circuit security feed from a random classroom would certainly not qualify for the Palme d'Or.

The filmmakers' decision to set the story entirely within the school campus is limiting. By design, we learn virtually nothing about the lives of the main character, Marin, or his colleagues. Information about the students is unavailable beyond their guarded behavior in class. The characterization is so paper-thin that the audience is forced to assign traits to the teachers and students. Marin is earnest and handsome, so we are invited to infer that he's smart and trying hard to do the right thing. His students are sullen and resistant, so we are invited to view them as unwitting martyrs.

This lack of characterization is troubling because the conclusion of the film invites judgment against Marin for underestimating his students. For example, in a final scene Marin learns, to his--and the audience's-- shock, that Esmeralda, a contrarian student, has independently read Plato's Republic. Darn, we're supposed think, he really didn't know his students. Well, since we don't really know either him or them beyond his toothless, meandering lessons and their uncooperative behavior, the revelation rings arbitrary and trite. (That is, unless we fill in the gaping blanks and accept the previously inarticulate, monotone-when-reading-aloud Esmeralda as a secret scholar.)

Following Esmeralda's bombshell, it's clear that Marin blew it all year. To compound his failure, Marin gives a brush-off to an at-risk girl who reaches out to him on the last day of class. Then we see an extended, silent wide shot of the empty classroom with toppled chairs. The movie ends on this utterly bleak note.

The Class is a film with an identity crisis. For the first 90 minutes, it's a fly-on-the-wall portrait of a struggling teacher not connecting with his students. That all unravels in the last half-hour when Marin fatally crosses a line by hurling an epithet at two of his students, instigating a rebellion that culminates in the expulsion of anti-hero student Souleymane.

The climactic discipline hearing for Souleymane is an audience-insulting kangaroo court, in which the principal--up to this point supportive and sympathetic--delivers long diatribes to Souleymane's non-French-speaking mother, even though he knows she can't understand him. Souleymane is ultimately expelled, likely to be shipped back to Mali. The audience is left with the impression that the adults within the school establishment are alternately insensitive, petty, and vindictive.

This faculty-bashing is reinforced in two other scenes. First, a teacher in the staff lounge callously follows an announcement that a student's mother has been arrested and may be deported by... popping champagne to announce her pregnancy! Then, in a staff meeting, a substantive conversation about creating a discipline system is curtailed--without a murmur of dissent-- in favor of a long, inane discussion about the lounge's coffee machine.

Is this school nothing more than a parade of grown-up idiots? If so, why am I watching a movie about it?

And then there's M. Marin, the well-dressed central character who may be, short of dealing out physical abuse, the most inept teacher one can imagine. Just some of Marin's lowest moments include:

--Forcing students to share personal information while disclosing nothing in return. Marin publicly asks students cringe-worthy questions like "What about your body makes you ashamed?"

--Being unable to articulate a definition of the word "succulent," which forms the basis of his vocabulary lesson.

--Handing out The Diary of Anne Frank, making the students read aloud, and then delivering an explanatory speech with no opportunity for students to voice opinions or questions.

--Providing no coherent rationale when questioned on why he spends substantial time teaching arcane verb tenses.

--Calling two female students "skanks" and then creating an angry mob scene on the blacktop by confronting the students with the shifting rationalization that (A) they misunderstood him, (B) teachers are allowed to say things that students cannot, and (C) he didn't know "skank" meant "prostitute."

--Hosting a largely unstructured class "debate" that devolves into racist catcalling. Marin lets the debacle continue until the situation is way out of hand.

Marin is so incompetent (in his fourth year!) that his blunders that compose the spine of The Class reveal little except that this guy is using an out-of-touch curriculum and that he's really bad at teaching it.

The Class sprints away so furiously from Hollywood archetypes that it finds itself at another, equally limited pole, one populated not by miracle teachers (Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers), but by hapless dunces; not by students waiting to be coaxed out of their shells (To Sir, With Love, Stand and Deliver) but by youths who cannot identify a single thing that they gain from school. Is there no middle ground between Jerry Bruckheimer's sap and M. Marin's unremitting tragedy?

More dramatic and realistic portraits of the messy, fascinating guts of school life can be found in the documentaries I Am a Promise--focusing on a Philadelphia elementary school-- and Hard Times at Douglass High--focusing on a Baltimore high school, both by Susan and Alan Raymond.

I am glad that The Class is jump-starting conversations about classrooms. I regret, however, that the actions of people as irresponsible as M. Marin and his colleagues, are the jumping-off points.

Dan Brown is a teacher and the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, a memoir of his first year teaching in the Bronx. (He -- perhaps jealously -- thinks his book would make a better movie than The Class.)

Comments

[BethB65]

I think so many teachers are working within a flawed system/stucture that limits them. How to succeed within that is very challenging and it seems like Mr. Marin could not figure out how.

Perhaps this movie will help change the discussion to how to restructure the system, while taking into account the needs of the community it serves.

[LorenSt]

You don't feel good at the end because it is a well made film. "The Class" doesn't tell you anything, it shows you. You find yourself deciding how you would have dealt with the situation. Remember these are isolated moments from an entire school year. If we filmed you for an entire year and showed all of your questionable decisions, we might have a bad impression of you. This film was made for a French audience. Anyone familiar with the French system would notice the rigidity of the curriculum, and the lack of cultural awareness. Notice that none of the teachers in this poor neighborhood were immigrants. This film is disturbingly believable and thought provoking.

[Michael Giltz]

I'm part of the lovefest for The Class, which I found extremely absorbing and moving. It was as suspenseful as any action film. I saw a good teacher who stumbled and let his mistakes compound one another, ultimately having a student pay the price for his unwillingness to place the boy's actions in context of the kid being ashamed to hear the teacher had said the kid was "limited" in a teacher's conference. While it's surprising to hear Esmerelda has read The Republic (as it would be for 99% of students in high school), it is not a shock that she is the one. Esmerelda throughout the film is a smart, challenging, fascinating student who clearly has a lot of potential. Her debates with the teacher on almost any and every issue are a highlight of the film; I don't see how anyone could watch the movie and NOT think this was a smart kid. As for the limitations of only seeing the kids in the classroom, isn't this what most teachers have to go on most of the time? I thought the faculty discussions were indicative of an ongoing debate with our "hero" on the side of seeing the kids as people to work with and other teachers who see the kids as the enemy. Maybe others will agree with you about the film, but I hope they'll check it out first, especially teachers.

[galaxian]

Confusing review. You seem to get it: "Marin is so incompetent (in his fourth year!) that his blunders that compose the spine of The Class reveal little except that this guy is using an out-of-touch curriculum and that he's really bad at teaching it."

But you don't like the fact that this is what's shown, that this is the focus. That it ends on a criticism instead of uplift. I can't figure out why. Teachers need better PR?

[gargravarr]

I recommend the documentary "Avoir et Étre", about a French teacher on the country side who teaches in an elementary school with only one class with children from 5 to 10. That is, if you want to see a (French) teacher you'd like to have been yours.

[Michael Giltz]

That is a GREAT documentary, absolutely absorbing and charming. It's called "To Be And To Have" in English and follows a country school teacher for one year. It's absolutely worth Netlixing.

[BethB65]

I agree! Awesome film! Great recommendation!

[scubalady]

The original title of the movie is Entre les murs. Translation: Between the walls.
Its goal was precisely to focus on what happens in the classroom,an angle you can disapprove with, but you certainly didn't discover during the projection­.Anyone who looks at the title knows that there will be no moving scene of teenagers on the playground or at the mall, of the teacher with his supporting or angry lover etc..
Another interesting thing is that you set the location in an "immigrant neighborhood outside Paris".Can­tet chose a school in Paris (20e arrondissement) eager to make the point that the problems of minorities­,identitie­s were not confined in some distant suburbs far from the shiny capital.Th­e school in the book is also in Paris.You go for the cliché, the same way many French do, assuming that such classes can only exist outside Paris.

[Carol Guest]

This a tautological way of saying that the reviewer didn't find the movie very interesting. When we talk about character and plot development, suspense, irony, and all those great tools of narrative we are really just enumerating the standard elements of an interesting story. But these tricks have no value without being interesting and if people can become engulfed in a story despite its lack of any of these elements, then they aren't necessary in that story.

To me this follows the line of argument of something like: almost all good deserts contain cream, chocolate or fruit in some form. And, as it turns out, tons of people love Baklava. But because Baklava has none of those normal elements, it can not possibly be good.

Ok, a saccharine analogy. But you get the point.

If he didn't find it interesting, he didn't find it interesting. But I'd challenge the reviewer to think about why so many people DID find it so interesting even though it was a very (intentionally) shallow view of the characters, and a string of events that you might see in any 4th grade classroom.

[vim876]

I think you are missing the point. "The Class" is only nominally about school, M. Marin, or even the students. It's about France. It's about the awkward, disjointed way that even the most well-meaning parts of French society are dealing with waves of immigration from places so different than their own. It's about those immigrants struggling to function in a system that doesn't even really try to understand them, only to make them French. It's about how these immigrants construct their identity. One of the most interesting pieces of the film is the interaction between Carl, the student from "the Carribean" (Martinique), and the African students. They ask him what nationality he is, and he says he is French. (Martinique, although it is in the Carribean, is a part of France.) Then they ask him why he always says he is "Carribean," and continue to heckle him. It's really about the fact that he has French citizenship; they are asking, even though he has that, if he really feels "French," if it is possible to become a part of that world without whiteness, without the culture of the metropole. They are asking him to tell them what identity he has chosen, as if there is no possibility of blending them. There are countless interactions like that. They tell you nothing about school, and everything about the changes taking place in France, and indeed, throughout Europe.

[havemysay]

I saw the movie and I couldn't agree more!!

[CLNX]

Finally! Thanks for making these points to balance the many positive reviews. I saw "The Class" with a friend, anticipating a wonderful intense movie (from the reviews, awards, etc.) We wondered, hey, where's that great flick we read about?? The main character of the teacher is lousy at his chosen profession: he's sarcastic and demeans students, then outright demands that they "respect" him- why? because he's the teacher. Having been lucky enough to have had some great teachers, this movie was all the more frustrating.

[galaxian]

Your last point about respecting the teacher is a good one, and one that should have opened your eyes a bit more. Mr. Marin, indeed, has his faults, yet most are aligned with the problems of trying to teach his kids how to be French--the curriculum corners him. He ends up as petty as the kids stuck in his class. Then there are no easy answers, and voila, The Class speaks the truth as pretty much no Hollywood film on the subject has.