Written by Andreas Babiolakis

This review is a part of the Palme d’Or Project: a review of every single Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival. The Class won the fifty third Palme d’Or at the 2008 festival.

The film was selected by the following jury.
Jury President: Sean Penn.
Jury: Jeanne Balibar, Rachid Bouchareb, Sergio Castellitto, Alfonso Cuarón, Alexandra Maria Lara, Natalie Portman, Marjane Satrapi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

How do we educate new generations when we ourselves are of a different time? That's what Laurent Cantet's pseudo-vérité film The Class boils down to: this disconnection between mindsets. Written by teacher François Bégaudeau, The Class is a semi autobiographical take on the will to teach those that feel like they are of a different world. The personalities between the teacher and their students just don't gel. The personal rifts of students don't matter to educators that are trying to be heard the most at the head of the classroom. Both the teacher and their students are meant to be neutral parties within this confined space for a few hours a day, so everyone can learn and become better equipped for society. What happens when personal lives or qualms enter this safe space? That sense of security dissipates.

Bégaudeau also stars in the film, and is able to act out his own experiences within the heightened drama found here. He is placed within a school of a poorer neighbourhood and he faces struggling youths of all walks of life. He is here to teach French to these classmates, and many of them are immigrants that need help. However, we have all been young students at some point in our lives. No one actually cares to learn. Well, the teacher (named François Marin in the film) will do whatever it takes to get them to study and become informed. He quickly adopts a no-nonsense style and is often abrasive with his class. You may find yourself at odds as to who you should root for right away, but The Class is less about taking sides and more about the acknowledgement that the education system, while well intentioned, may have a lot of flaws.

Part of these issues stem from the lack of care within society: the converging of poorer communities into certain schools and left to fend for themselves as the privileged can have a better education. Then there are the teachers that have to fend for themselves within districts that society gave up on long ago. You’d think that there would be common ground between both the adult and the youths that have had to endure tough lives, but everyone is at odds with each other. Teachers get strict. Students get defensive. Classmates are snippy or rude towards one another. Cliques form. Some students are ostracized. Despite the same battle, there is a lot of friction and individuality within the classroom. This is what Bégaudeau gets across from his own experiences, and what Cantet picks up on whilst directing these exhibitions.

While we get a bit of a rundown as to how Marin runs his operation, that’s when The Class begins to kick into its fifth gear narratively. Suddenly there are tensions between him and some of his students, and it is through these arguments that you get a real sense of what the film is trying to get at. This is especially true when the other students either counter the lone teens that egg Marin on or Marin himself in defence of their classmates. Not once does The Class tell you whose cases you should justify. If anything, we’re seeing one of two things: both a teacher and his students in the wrong as they are displaying a lack of respect towards one another, and all of these characters on the same level within an educational structure that has failed them all. Either way, something is amiss in The Class. One cannot learn when there are both disturbances and stunting at play. The entire purpose of schooling goes out the window.

That’s about where The Class leaves us off: the question on what each student has taken out of this year. In a fuller setting, students are a bit reluctant to respond to Marin’s pondering of how valuable the class has been for both him and his pupils. When given the opportunity to talk one-on-one, one teen has her own answer: a complete void. Nothing was gained. You can consider this response to be one about the literal subject matter that Marin tried to encourage his students to follow, or about something larger and pertaining to life itself. How prepared are these teens when they go out to the real world? Is Marin himself of the same existential anxiety as his students? I can tell you this: at thirty three years of age, I feel as aimless as I did as a ten year old. I’m sure this is the case for most of us. It’s the additional similarity that Marin shares with his class that no one picks up on within the confinements of the motion picture. Where do we go from here? These teens are wondering that, but so is Marin himself. We all are. The Class is where we as viewers are as equivalent with Cantent and the cast and crew as the character Marin is with his assigned students: we are united in our questioning of what all of this is for, and what is in store for us. The final images serve as a reminder to have an aside every now and then to avoid the burden of mundanity: we can’t answer everything, so we may as well enjoy what we are certain about while we are still here (either on the school grounds or in this big game called life).

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.