One of the Best Films Ever Made About a Teacher and His Students
Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, The Class (2008) has received nearly universal critical acclaim. It's a fictional French movie that feels so authentic it plays more like a documentary. The source material was a 2006 novel written by François Bégaudeau based on his teaching experience at a school in an ethnically diverse working-class Paris neighborhood. In the film, Bégaudeau plays a version of himself struggling through an academic year, and the students, portrayed by nonprofessional actors, give him plenty of grief. There is some humor, but this is basically a thought-provoking, intense drama.
The protagonist is the earnest, but not lovable François Marin (Bégaudeau), who tries to teach French to 14- and 15-year-olds, several of whom are surly and unruly. Key students we follow are of Arab and African descent, along with a Chinese kid. Marin partially engages the teenagers by giving an assignment to compose self-portraits, but they are unreceptive to lessons on verb tenses and poetry. A girl named Esméralda challenges Marin's authority at every turn, and she finally exasperates him to the point where he makes the mistake of using a pejorative term. A scuffle breaks out, a student is injured, and a disciplinary hearing is held with serious results.
The brilliance of The Class is its unromanticized dramatization of the relationship between a teacher and his students. But the film makes clear the importance of having a good school system, and the stakes are high for both individuals and society.
Making-Of Featurette and Commentary on Two Sequences
The Class DVD provides an enjoyable 42-minute making-of documentary. Here you can see director Laurent Cantet conducting workshops with the real-life students who play characters in the film. With a sense of purpose, the teenagers are fully engaged and working hard. Later, the kids are thrilled when they get to go to Cannes where The Class is in competition, and when Sean Penn announces in English the winner of the Palme d'Or, some of the teenagers seem to have momentary difficulty in processing that they have won the prestigious film festival's biggest prize.
The DVD contains about 23 minutes of commentary by director Laurent Cantet and novelist/teacher/actor François Bégaudeau on two of the movie's key sequences. One of these is on the classroom discussion of the imperfect subjunctive verb tense, which the teacher says only snobs use in conversation, but he defends teaching it because of its literary usage. The other is on the heated dispute in the school courtyard between the teacher and the student named Esméralda over the French word "pétasse" (translated "skank" in the English subtitles and "bitch" in the English dubbing). The confrontation ends with the frustrated, angry teacher fleeing, defeated in a verbal sparring match by a 15-year-old while a group of students cheered her on.
DVD Details
Below I have listed all the details for the DVD containing The Class.
Release Date: August 11, 2009
Feature Film Runtime: 2 hours 10 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for Language
Aspect Ratio 2.35:1, Color
French Dolby Surround
English-Dubbed Soundtrack
Spanish-Dubbed Soundtrack
English Subtitles
Spanish Subtitles
Commentary by Director & Writer/Actor (2 scenes, total runtime = 23 min.)
Making of The Class (42 min.)
Theatrical Trailer
