By chronicling the daily struggles of a French teacher to communicate with his students, "The Class" communicates the inner complexities of the school system not only in France but in any suburban, impoverished area of any Western city, or it's even more universal than that.There is an irony in that psychological arm-wrestling engaged all through the year, the teachers mean good and want to deliver the best, but the students are intelligent enough to question the value of the teaching. Of course, they're not always right, but their way of being wrong can engage in more fruitful discussions than if everybody nodded in unison. It's not about being another brick in the wall, like the song says, but a free spirit behind these walls. And that's the real delight of "The Class", it follows François Marin, played by François Bégaudeau, real-life teacher and author of the original book. He's not a rookie, this is not your typical teacher in a tough class, he knows many students and there seems to be mutual respect despite the usual heckling. But when the bedlam starts, you're suddenly drawn into exchanges where even Marin nods and accepts that these kids have a point, like the uselessness of complicated and sophisticated tenses in real life.The film rises above all the clichés and preconceived notions about the 'suburbs' without sugarcoating them. The melting pot isn't devoid of individual prejudices, against gays, Blacks, Arabs or even white people. By never resorting to self-censorship, "The Class" is a rare opportunity for a real confrontation between the ideals of education and the reality. I've been there too, support at school for fourth and fifth graders, but I've learned very quickly that you can't win them with good intentions. You can't cheat, you must be close enough to earn their respect, not their friendship as it's the perfect ticket for insolence and insubordination, that's the dosage. And over the course of the year, well-meaning and imperfect Marin is confronted to the resistance, verbal, non-verbal or physical from students such as Khoumba, a girl of African background who feels harassed by the teacher, another kid who dares to ask the teacher if he's gay, and perhaps the most memorable student: Esmeralda a tough cookie who calls a spade a spade. There is also a Gothic kid who's not ashamed to display his 'difference', a Chinese teen who works harder than anyone and the gallery never seems forced or cliché, no archetypes but some realities cinema seldom dealt with. While not a documentary, the film is certainly closer to that genre than any fiction but the merit of the director, Laurent Cantet is to have taken non professional kids and made them act so natural, it's one thing to direct a movie like "Avatar" but for "The Class", the directing doesn't get enough credit and works on an Oscar worthy level. If I could find a name to define it, it would be dynamic, in the classroom scenes, it's always like the camera is swinging ping pong style between François and the kids as if it impersonated the way the professor's mind works, like a radar: any voice heard, any intervention deserves to be given its proper attention."Behind the Walls" is the French title and I think it could have been better to keep it like this, because the walls of the class while being generally associated to "entrapment", unleash the best out of these kids and become an area of verbal liberty. Many subplots involve the tough life of these kids outside the class, and indirectly pinpoint the liberating aspect of these walls. The tragedy is that many students don't value it and in one scene, another teacher lets some steam off and can't stand anymore the way they all reject the hand that tries to teach them, he seems to be at the verge of a breakdown and everyone lets him talk. We see him again a few months later, as if nothing happened. Even a teacher needs to "let it go".And this lack of flawlessness is wonderfully conveyed in the case that would lead to the film's climactic 'battle', involving a word the teacher said to qualify the class representatives, provoking a fight in the classroom and disciplinary committee for the troublemaker. It leads to the moment where François is confronted by the students not in the classroom but the schoolyard, and that was a nice twist. Out of his zone of comfort, Marin is almost verbally lynched by the student who want to give him a taste of his own medicine, and while some are sincere, you can tell that for Esmeralda, it's like a poetic justice, to be able to toy with the teacher's emotions and win the verbal contest.I could relate to that because kids can be sneaky, when they know they don't have the upper hand, they use their solidarity and a truncated version of facts. The film starts with a teacher teaching them how to communicate, well at the end he's taught a lesson, if he told girls that during the counsel, they behaved liked bitches, he might as well have called them whores, same effect. The word itself will be used later in a more humorous way, but it shows that language has a weight, a pending gravitas, an equilibrium that can be destroyed at any time. That's how tough it is to teach students.Unanimously winning the Golden Palm in 2008, "The Class" is a real example on how cinema can serve a cause by just being itself, just filming. There's no dramatization, no need of plotting, just a bunch of kids who improvised enough to accentuate the realism, only following guidelines of themes to talk about, and the rest is just one of the realistic documentary-like movies ever made, a real success, a unique film, a school-case of cinema vérité in every sense of the word.

In some respects this is Etre et Avoir both urbanized and upgraded from ecole to lycee; at yet another remove it's a latter-day Blackboard Jungle inasmuch as both titles feature multi-racial inner city schools where the pupils are more or less killing time before becoming old enough to leave. Evan Hunter based his novel on his own experience as a teacher at a vocational school in New York but he stopped short there, unlike the author of Between The Walls who not only penned a semi-autobiographical novel but adapted it for the screen and then played the lead who is, of course, more or less himself. Strangely enough there is less violence here (2008) than there was in Blackboard Jungle in 1955 which could, of course, be taken as an encouraging sign.The kids and the teaching staff are also real and the twelve month rehearsal period results in a documentary which has been polished to fictional standards. Definitely worth a look.

The movie portraits an interracial class in a Paris town. The plot is simple. It will cover some conflicts developed in the last term of a primary school year. It's mainly focused on the relation of the class and a Language professor who seems to be the most concerned about the class of all the other teachers at school. We see a little bit of the relationships between the teachers and how they solve conflict with the students. The class has pretty colorful characters from France, Asia, and Africa mainly. If you are a teacher, you will have a lot of material to discuss about. And will enjoy how the student's stories are unveiled.

A remarkable movie on contemporary themes of migration, education, integration, individuality, and dilemmas one faces.The French have a style of realism that captivates and arrests you. What happened to whom is not the point of the film. These things could happen to anyone around you is.Moving, honest, and with the illusion of a spontaneity, the narrative gains in truthfulness. The best of us are fallible, the toughest are vulnerable, and no system is good for everyone.See the film if you've been to high school, or been a teacher in one. If you've felt out of place in your school because your color isn't right or your accent isn't right or your parents aren't cool, well, what can I say? See the film.