THE CLASS Directed by LAURENT CANTET WRITTEN BY CANTET, ROBIN CAMPILLO, AND FRANCOIS BEGAUDEAU
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The Cannes award is yet another triumph for Cantet, whose first feature, Human Resources (1999), won the Cesar for best debut film, and whose second, Time Out (2001), won the FIPRESCI international critics’ prize. Both films share with The Class a strong sense of how individuals struggle with and are often crushed by institutions. The protagonist of Time Out is a middle-aged financial consultant who’s been fired from his job but refuses to tell his family or accept it himself, driving around for days at a time; he even dresses for work at one point, drives to an office complex, and sneaks in with a cluster of other workers to wander around the building. Human Resources lays the groundwork for The Class in examining power relationships in the workplace; here the central character is a college student, the son of a small-town factory worker, who hires on as a summer trainee in the human resources department of his father’s factory. The class line between management and labor is strictly enforced—not least by the hero’s father, who dissuades his son from eating lunch with him and their friends on the assembly line.
If you’ve ever fought with a bunch of rowdy kids for control of a classroom, you know the tension that runs through the teaching sequences of The Class. The kids are brutal—loud and rude, challenging Marin, doing their best to throw the lesson off-course. Especially dangerous is the crafty Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani), who sits in the dead center of the room, bolstered by her sulking pal Khoumba (Rachel Regulier). Marin accompanies his lessons in French grammar and writing with a fair amount of Socratic questioning, and the class discussions regularly expose the fault line between white and nonwhite culture. “You always use whitey names,” observes Esmeralda as Marin writes sample sentences on the blackboard. When Marin tries to teach them subjunctive mood (“if I were you”), they demand to know why they should learn it when no one they know uses it, and Souleymane, a large and troublesome Malian teen, sidetracks the lesson by asking Marin to comment on schoolyard rumors that he’s gay. A four-year veteran at the school, Marin is a devoted teacher who tries hard to bridge the divide with his students, but it’s an uphill battle when they refer to detention as “Guantanamo.”
