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The Class Movie Review

The Class is a 2008 French drama film directed by Laurent Cantent and starring Francois Begaudeau. It’s one of the best modern French movies.

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“I didn’t ask you what you liked in the class,

I want to know what you learned from it“

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Teacher and novelist François Begaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood. The film is based on a novel by Begaudeau himself, a book that is semi-autographical in his recount of his teaching years. It was a fantastic choice to have him be the main performer as he went through most of the drama himself, so he could play it in his sleep.

Even with that being said, his performance is so exceptional here that you’d think that he was a professional actor. It’s a shame that he would never return to acting after this feature. He could have been a very good performer. But at least he impressed everybody in the role of Marin, a phenomenally written and surprisingly realistic teacher character. He will easily be relatable for many teachers watching the film.

Another small miracle in The Class lies in the student performances. Every single one of them did such a stupendous job, being immensely believable. Grounded is the name of the game for this entire film as everything felt plausible and true to life. There is an eclectic bunch of students depicted here – we have a problematic one prone to anger, a cocky delegate, confrontational students and the silent types. They are so different altogether, making this class seem like a real one.

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The Class effectively captures that feeling of chaos that every school class exudes. You never know what will happen and all can go down in flames very rapidly. This negatively impacts teachers in particular who end up being punished just for trying to lead their classes properly and peacefully. What Marin goes through in this story is truly horrifying.

A lot has been said about his teaching methods, which obviously do not work. The film does propose that a stricter and more disciplined teaching is necessary for most in order to properly control these hormone-riddled teenagers. This is one of the two messages that you can take from this movie if you are a somewhat conservative viewer. Obviously, the movie isn’t fully transparent with its intentions given that the director purposely included a documentarian, cinema verite approach to storytelling.

But still you can read between the lines yourself and realize that this leftist, overly pacifist teaching doesn’t lead you anywhere but to an inevitable headache. An even more conservative viewing of the film involves the issues of race and class. France has become quite multicultural in recent decades and this film truthfully depicts the many problems that stem from that heavy immigration. Depicting the inconsolable cultural differences and the incompatibility of these immigrants with the Western school system, The Class doesn’t judge or moralize, but just presents France as it is now, especially in the poorer areas, portraying the many inescapable issues of multiculturalism and progressivism.

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The movie is very well edited and directed. It flies by how engaging and well paced it is. The structure is phenomenal and this is a rare documentarian drama that worked as it felt both realistic and fictional enough. The movie put a lot on its plate, thus not all students and teachers got their proper due. More could have been done with the other students as it focused heavily on mostly a couple of the main troublemakers. But it for the most part elicited that feeling of being in a class either as a student or as a teacher and that level of authenticity is its biggest asset. It shamelessly lost an Oscar to a much inferior film.