If you close your eyes, The Class can be a story about any school, anywhere. Pupils from different cultural backgrounds are flung together in a shared space and expected to just make it work.
Mr Marin (François Bégaundeau) is a French teacher at a tough inner-city middle school in Paris. His learners are brutal in their scrutiny of everything he says.
If you close your eyes, The Class can be a story about any school, anywhere. Pupils from different cultural backgrounds are flung together in a shared space and expected to just make it work.
Mr Marin (François Bégaundeau) is a French teacher at a tough inner-city middle school in Paris. His learners are brutal in their scrutiny of everything he says.
He tries to teach them to conjugate verbs; they question the relevance of the imperfect subjunctive and his use of whitey names like Bill in their work exercises.
The African students in the class question Marin’s sexuality and they associate him with a group they refer to as Camemberters; white French people who wear suits and ties and “stink of cheese”.
The pupils question their identities, and refuse to think of themselves as French. Issues of identity and culture constantly bubble beneath the surface.
This makes it very difficult for Marin to connect with his students, because he cannot relate to their lives. After reading a passage from The Diary of Anne Frank, Marin instructs them to write their own slife stories.
This film is poignant without being sentimental. Do not expect a feel good happy ending as in The Ron Clark Story; a movie about a white teacher in Harlem, USA and his plight to ‘save’ his learners. Marin does not try to save anyone.
The Class is an intelligent representation of a modern, hybridised society. The learners rightfully accuse the teachers of teaching them bourgeois values that have no meaning in their lives.
At the heart of the education system is a pathetic attempt to control the learners in a system that they cannot help but to contradict.
The Class is based on Bégaundeau’s best-selling autobiographical novel and directed by Laurent Cantet. The film was named best picture at the Palme D’Or Festival de Cannes in 2008.
It also received an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. But really the theme is so familiar it could have been about any public school in South Africa; minus the American romanticism usually associated with cultural diversity.
Catch The Class today at 7pm at Eden Grove Red Lecture Theatre. Next week’s La Haine (Hate) is a gritty and unsettling movie about Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd – a Jew, an African, and an Arab – who give human faces to France’s immigrant populations.
