Entre les murs
Laurent Cantet (2008)
In 2006, François Bégaudeau published his third novel, Entre les murs, based on his experience as a teacher in an inner-city middle school in Paris. Bégaudeau (according to Wikipedia) is a movie critic for the French version of Playboy, having previously worked for Cahiers du cinéma, and now the anchor for a daily magazine programme on French television. He adapted his novel for the screen with Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo (who also edited the film) – and Cantet cast Bégaudeau, who had never acted previously, to play the central character of the teacher. A piece on Cantet in The Big Issue explains that he had used a near-documentary style and non-professional actors in earlier features (Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001)) and:
‘For The Class, he decided to go even further. They chose a school in Paris’ racially mixed 20th arrondissement, and held casting calls for the actual students. Those selected went to workshops for several months, wherein characters and relationships gradually evolved, frequently in close connection to the students’ own lives. …’
The action takes place over the course of a school year and the encounters between the teacher François Marin (Bégaudeau) and his class (I would guess they’re 14- or 15-year olds but could be wrong) are the spine and the heart of The Class. The lessons are intercut with shorter scenes in the staffroom, in the school’s recreation area and, as the film progresses, with interviews at a parents evening, an assessment meeting and eventually a student disciplinary hearing. The classroom scenes are wonderful – so complete in themselves that I’d have been happy if the film had consisted only of these. I was delighted that François was a teacher of French and found the scene involving the imperfect subjunctive pleasantly nostalgic as well as an interesting insight into the survival of formal language teaching in French secondary schools; whether there’s any good reason for this is the subject of an excellent heated debate between François and his class. François goes way beyond the grammar book and set texts – perhaps beyond the bounds of being a creative teacher. He doesn’t just want to stimulate the mind and imagination of his students: he seems to want to get inside their heads and he certainly gets under their skins. The running argument and the shifting balance of power in these scenes are breathtaking: they’re bracing, funny, startling – and almost too entertaining. After an hour or so (the film runs 128 minutes but you’d never guess it), I realised I was so absorbed by the dynamics of what I was seeing and hearing that I wasn’t attending sufficiently to the social issues and tensions that the exchanges within François’s classrom were signalling.
Because the classroom is dramatically self-sufficient, it naturally tends to eclipse the other settings. The opening sequence, which introduces us to each member of the staff, works well but, from an early stage, the staffroom sequences seem like bits of filler between the high drama of what’s happening in François’s lessons. For much of the time, the screenplay and direction make a virtue of this. There’s a funny and well-observed debate at a staff meeting about the cost of using the coffee machine; the matter seems trivial compared with the problems attendant on immigration and racial integration that are faced by the students, many of North African origin, in François’s class. The (white) staff aren’t exactly being lampooned for the shallowness of their preoccupations but we can get a sense that it’s a relief to them to have such a minor issue to be exercised by. It’s also a strength of The Class that Cantet, Bégaudeau and Campillo don’t write in any backstory for François or – with one exception – any of the other staff at all; and the exception is provided in a satisfying way. When the staff learn that the mother of the Chinese boy in the class is facing deportation, the teacher who was most unhappy with the proposed increase of ten centimes for a coffee admits rather sheepishly that ‘I have some news too’ (she’s pregnant).
It’s perhaps inevitable that a quasi-documentary approach like the one Laurent Cantet takes here will tend to a loss of nerve and that the film will move eventually towards a more familiar dramatic shape. As the students’ problems, and the tensions between them and François, emerge more clearly, this certainly happens, and it detracts from the originality of The Class. François Bégaudeau is extraordinary throughout but he is perceptibly acting in the exchanges at the parents evening in a way that is never apparent in the classroom. The hearing of disciplinary charges against the Malian student Souleymane is, in conventional terms, the dramatic climax of the film but, in realistic respects, its weakest scene. It’s implausible that François, given how personally implicated he is in the case, would remain a member of the disciplinary committee – especially when we’ve already seen that the school is committed to transparency in its governance and academic processes to what seems a remarkable extent: there are class representatives at the meeting of staff that decides on the grades to be given to each student. I also thought this school would have been sensitive enough to provide a translator for the benefit of Souleymane’s mother rather than expect the boy himself to tell his mother what his accusers are saying. In both cases, Cantet seems to take the dramatically convenient option: one of the parent members of the committee objects to François’s membership of the committee but the head teacher overrules the objection; there’s a payoff in Souleymane’s translating for his mother. (We see the boy’s shame in her presence in a way we wouldn’t if he kept silent and this is so different from the figure he’s cut in the classroom that the effect is powerful and upsetting.)
Cantet handles the cast superbly. It’s achievement enough to get the performances he gets from the kids, even if he’s not the first director to bring out untapped potential from a group of youngsters in this sort of way. They’re a great collection of physical types and faces – especially the Tunisian girl Esmeralda, another African girl Koumba, and Souleymane. What Cantet gets from François Bégaudeau is something else. This is a man in his mid-thirties – highly educated and steeped in knowledge of cinema, but not a film actor (he does have professional experience as a performer – with a 1990s punk rock band). It would be wrong to assume that Bégaudeau’s teaching experience in the twentieth arrondissement made reenacting this a piece of cake – he’s being asked not simply to ‘be himself’ but to play a character whom he has based on himself. In other words, he has to draw both on himself and on his imaginative resources – and the extent to which Bégaudeau is willing to express sometimes dislikeable feelings is admirable. He shows us moments when François Marin is really pushing it: when he asks the kids to tell their secrets and you sense an almost bloody-minded inquisitiveness mixed in with his determination to draw out something positive, and especially, in the scene in which he’s determined to extract an apology from Koumba. He’s right to expect the apology but, when it won’t come, he becomes more aggressively insistent – and he ends up looking like someone who’s abused his position of power. There’s a remarkable bit when Souleymane starts making cryptic remarks and François gets him to say what he means, which is that ‘people say’ that ‘you like men, sir’. François’s colour rises slightly and there’s a riveting cut-and-thrust with the teacher trying to get the boy to say whether he would have a problem with that if it were true, and the boy denying that he would but continuing to ask if it is. (At the point at which François seems to have got the upper hand, he says it isn’t true anyway.) I hope Bégaudeau does more acting but, if he doesn’t, what he does here is more than many actors manage in a lifetime.
While the kids’ performances raise your spirits, the students’ behaviour is often depressing – especially their hypocritical self-righteousness. They insult François with impunity; the class representatives in the assessment meeting misbehave and leak the confidential discussion from that meeting to their classmates; but when François says that they acted like a pair of ‘skanks’, all hell breaks loose (it’s this that starts the chain of events that leads to Souleymane being disciplined and expelled). The unhappy notes are played in different registers. François asks the kids to write self-portraits; when, as part of this project, Souleymane produces some digital photographs and François posts them on the wall to show off as good work, Souleymane receives this as a purely patronising gesture. And when François, in the last class of the year, asks each student what it is they’ve got most from during the session, Esmeralda stuns him (and us), not by telling him that all the books the class studied with him were shit but that she enjoyed reading, independently, Plato’s Republic. (It turns out her sister is a university law student and Esmeralda borrowed the book from her.) At the end of the same class, after all the other students have left the room, a girl who’s not said a word since the girl next to her provided a prompt on the first day of the school year, comes to François and tells him, in a sorrowful, baffled tone, that she’s not learned anything at all: the shocking irony is that, as François helplessly reassures her, her grades are good enough for her to go forward into the next year.
This really is an example of a subject which, if it had been done in a mainstream American film, would likely have been artificially resolved: the teacher’s inspirational skills would have ‘solved’ the kids’ problems in an absolutely life-changing way. Although the fact that the issues here are mostly unresolved is troubling, it’s also refreshing that the class haven’t been moulded into an award-winning orchestra or racially-harmonised dance ensemble. This gives a terrific edge to the closing end-of-school-year moments when the kids and staff are relaxing, playing football together: they’re not one big happy family but they’ve got through another year more or less intact. One of the striking things about The Class is that it makes you wonder whether one or two of the kids might remember and appreciate François Marin, in years to come, as someone trying to do something worthwhile – a Hollywood treatment of this kind of subject wouldn’t leave that kind of residue. In 2008 The Class was the first French film to win the Golden Palm at Cannes for 21 years. It’s the best new French film I can remember seeing in a long time, one of the best pictures I’ve seen from anywhere in the last year and also one of the most enjoyable. In Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman used animation to create a new kind of documentary; in The Class, Laurent Cantet makes inventive use of documentary and naturalistic techniques (and – a rarity – no use of music at all) to bring to the screen a phenomenally likeable and really distinctive piece of drama.
1 March 2009
