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Hollywood never seems to get it right when it comes to movies about teachers. Stand and Deliver, Teachers, Mister Holland's Opus, Dead Poets Society, these movies were all highly acclaimed. However, none of the situations in these movies would ever occur in a real school. But in Hollywood, anything is possible, even the parting of the Dead Sea.
Perhaps that is why I appreciated "The Class". The movie can be summed up in one word...unpretentious. No miracles are performed, nor does the teacher Francois(played by Francois Begaudeau) lead his students to a far away promised land. Watching the movie, I felt as if I was actually inside a real classroom(which I should know, for I have been a teacher for some thirty years), and Francois was a colleague. Francois reminded me how every dedicated teacher begins the year with the intention of doing good and somehow changing the world...then come the power struggles, the reality that he/she is playing to captive audience, and the realization he/she has absolutely no control over what takes place outside the classroom, and within a matter of weeks the idealism becomes acceptance, or worse, cynicism. Francois has many layers. When he speaks to his class, his body language is animated. He cannot speak without moving his hands, he is constantly walking all over the classroom, his head bends slightly forward; even his eyebrows wrinkle upwards and across his face. But then there are several scenes where he is wandering through the hallways of the school, carrying his briefcase, head bent forward as if he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Then there are the students. They have many dimensions:fear, frustration, laughter, confrontation, hopeful, indifferent, argumentative, bored, scared, disciplined, undisciplined, clever, devious, lost, insightful. Anyone who has ever worked with large numbers of adolescents knows how adept they are at studying, and then dissecting the adult in front of them. At times, Francois seems completely unaware of their intense scrutiny But those moments don't last very long, for the students are not afraid to tell him they are bored, and see absolutely no relevance to the words that are being written on the blackboard. The title of the movie in French is "Between The Walls", which I feel is a much better title. In many ways, the film is claustrophobic... the closeness of the desks, the complete lack of sunlight in the room, the students sitting in hard wooden seats...and then there's the constant stretching, twitching, legs nor arms ever still. For me, the ultimate beauty of this film is its universality. Francois's classroom could have been any classroom in America. The challenges he faces are the challenges all teachers confront. There is no other job that is as challenging, nor rewarding. But it also can burden the soul unless one realizes that the world doesn't change, that the students in front of you at the beginning of the year might have grown just a little bit taller by the end of the year, but still have the same morals, insecurities, and dare I say it..dreams. Francois's students might not gain the love of reading Voltaire or Camus, nor comprehend the feelings of a small girl whose life was taken from her at the very moment her sense of wonder began to bloom in "The Diary of Anne Frank". But maybe, because of his efforts, his students might be able to conjugate verbs, write complete sentences, develop a theme in any essay, and one day soar above the heavens. One of them might even decide to become a French teacher.
The movie has no real ending. In this way, it reproduces actual life. At the end of the year, the students go out the door. Life goes on.