The Class (Laurent Cantet, France): 61

I guess there's just no pleasing me (cue vigorously nodding heads), because for the first hour, when the film seems wholly dedicated to observing the student-teacher dynamic in a multiculti Paris classroom, I found myself admiring its rigor and intelligence but also wishing that something a little extra-scholastic might happen. Then a narrative gradually, almost imperceptibly emerged, and suddenly I longed for Cantet to return to pure pedagogy -- mostly on account of the intense feeling of déjà vu. Complaining that a two-hour movie can't match the dizzying depth and cumulative force of an entire season of The Wire (see also Gomorrah) may seem unfair, but there's no denying that in its second half, as The Class's anecdotal nature gets overwhelmed by the question of whether certain problem students are worth "saving," the film moves into territory that David Simon and his crew handled with a great deal more complexity and finesse -- in part because they didn't restrict themselves entirely to the school grounds. I'm generally in favor of Von Trier-esque "obstructions," but in this case the sole-location strategy places undue emphasis on François Bégaudeau, playing (essentially) himself in an adaptation of his own memoir and coming off as a secular saint with a breaking point. Accusations of narcissism are perhaps a bit overstated, but there is something vaguely self-serving about this project, despite a plot that ultimately pivots on Monsieur Chips' use of a word that the subtitles translate as "skanks." (Given the reaction of everyone in the movie, the actual French word must have way more odious connotations.) It's an uncommonly subdued heroic-teacher drama, inclined to lengthy digressions about the contemporary relevance of the imperfect subjunctive (a scene I recalled just yesterday when reading David Fear's review of Elite Squad, which asks, apropos of BOPE and with an apparently straight face, "Whom do you call when shit goes down?"; can we please fucking kill the few lingering remnants of Old English case structure?), but it still fits the genre, and its many limitations, quite snugly.

Posted on 10/03/08 by: dangelo 03:48 PM