i 'The Class'
Morning Sentinel
'The Class'
Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 03/12/2009

"The Class," Laurent Cantet's much raved winner of the 2009 French Oscars, Cesar Awards, Independent Film Spirit Award and the prestigious Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival, is a 2009 Academy Award nominated film that has debuted in Waterville at the Railroad Square Cinema.

With all of those glossy medals attached, one should feel in the presence of greatness. I did not. Despite all those awards, and some nice performances from amateurs, why did I feel it was so boring?

There is a freshness in Francois Bégaudeau, who co-wrote the script and plays the part of Francois Marin, the teacher who leads the class. Francois is a pleasant man, and handles his part without stumbling.

But he is the lead. We sit in his classroom with his students, all the real kids from this school for quite a long time. After a while it felt like being forced to go back to junior high and relive the worst parts all over again.

A part such as Bégaudeau's should bear some responsibility for keeping us focused and hopefully, at least, from going to sleep. He's an agreeable actor but painfully one of low wattage. We live for 128 minutes through his struggle to connect with kids who consider him little more than a warden, and his struggle to keep from drowning in frustration.

The film's theme deals with the problems of trying to educate, and in some cases, civilize students of Francoise Dolto Junior High in a rough neighborhood in Paris. Racial and cultural tensions keep the daily boiling point high for those involved, not for us in the seats.

All colors and creeds circle one another and throw off sparks that ignite squabbles and feuds. We would think that sooner or later, blood would be spilled on the playground.

But this is not a "Blackboard Jungle" movie. There are no life threatening confrontations. No one pulls a gun or a knife. All the confrontations are solved cerebrally. That's swell for a jury room, but this is a movie. The only violence that occurs is when a rebellious young African, who by the way, has been through several schools, pulls away from the teacher and accidentally cuts a girl's forehead with his backpack.

The whole tone of the film is improvisational, a cinema verite paste up of what it's like to be a foreign student in a strange and brutal landscape. Most of the kids are the children of immigrants to France, who find themselves in a Benetton world without the glossy cover. We meet the parents at Parents Night, a polyglot of immigrants, some of whom speak French, others who do not. There are Chinese and African and Mid Eastern families here, but, strangely, despite the reputation of this neighborhood as being a tough one, they all seem pretty bland, non confrontative and sweet. Actually, the parents are more boring than the kids.

There is the exception of the African boy from the Republic of Mali whose mother, a respectable woman, does not speak French. He sits at the back of the room and refuses help or even small kindnesses from his fellow students. In place of a chip, he wears a sentence from the Koran tattooed on his shoulder, which clearly he does not really understand. It's only a badge he employs to set himself apart from the group, even from the other blacks. We can sense he is terrified of this new world and his abusive father, and rebellion is his only cover.

But even that character fails to ignite and when it appears, for a moment, that he may explode and let off some real tension, the fuse sputters out.

The problem here is that there is, of course, no real script. The students, we're told, were encouraged to create characters unlike themselves. If these are the most interesting they can come up with, how exciting are they on their own streets?

We spend a long, long time sitting in this claustrophobic classroom, set inside a prison-like courtyard that sits behind high walls, with an eager, but dull, teacher who struggles to connect with his kids. Then we spend an equally long time in teacher conferences, also improvised, where the principal and his staff engage in long conversations about how to proceed with daily problems. And the excitement continues.

Clearly, what Bégaudeau and Cantet are trying to do, is show us the conflicts that are creating such racial and cultural turmoil in France today. But at this, they fail. There is somewhere, in his idea, a great movie buried here; a Gallic West Side Story perhaps, one played out on the streets, in the homes and schools of France. This is a major problem in Europe and film makers need to make it more visible. But you need fire to light up the sky. In "The Class," we get only a few embers.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.

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