Yesterday we came across one of those sad news that mainly affects French cinematography, although in reality they are a complete humanistic loss. We are talking about the death of Laurent Cantet, who at the age of 63 died in his home in Paris due to an illness that has not yet been clarified.
It goes like this one of those social cinema filmmakers who have done the most to investigate the complex dynamics of French societystarting with his acclaimed debut feature ‘Human Resources‘, which triumphed at the César Awards as best new work, and ending with his exploration of social networks in ‘Arthur Rambo‘. Although if one work from his filmography must be highlighted in particular, it should be ‘The Class’.
Within the school walls
The film that swept the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, achieving a unanimous Palme d’Or which had not achieved a French film for more than 20 years. A special look at the world of education and the structuring of society in France that is worth recovering on this day. It can be seen streaming through acontra+, Filmin, Movistar+ and also for free on Tivify.
In it François Bégaudeau is a high school teacher in a marginal and multicultural neighborhood, who acts as a class tutor in addition to teaching French language. The differences in sociological context do not prevent him from trying to reach them from a certain sophisticated reasoning, despite the refusals that these students usually give. Good intentions will not be enough in a complicated context to which the frustration of the rest of the teaching staff will be added.
The film has a semi-autobiographical basis, adapting Bégaudeau’s own book with his experiences as a high school tutor. The writer and screenwriter takes the leading role here, and the students are played by young performers although their characters take their first names, giving the entire project an almost docudrama air that slowly transformsand without announcing it, in a good pressure cooker.
‘The Class’: tense educational docudrama
There is not here the forceful thriller exercise of a film with similar intentions as ‘Teachers’ Room’. Cantet shows interested in the more human and naturalistic aspects of the story you are telling, although it may be escalating in aspects such as tension. For this reason he renounces structuring the entire story around a skeleton like a traditional plot.
The result is still amazingcapturing an interesting side of education where a teacher must find a way to put himself at the level of his interlocutors, and not because of moral superiority but because he is the possessor of experience and knowledge.
At the same time, the students present themselves as reluctant but intelligent, knowing that the entire process is not an attempt to turn them into model citizens even though they will not really have opportunities once they leave those walls. Is one of the most interesting explorations of that social drama subgenre that depicts the school as a prison.
In Espinof:
