Class Act

It all began when French film director Laurent Cantet posted some casting notices at a junior high school in a rough multicultural neighborhood in Paris’s 20th arrondissement. A little more than a year later, the 25 adolescents selected in that casting call were standing on stage beside Cantet, grinning dazedly under the glaring lights, as he accepted this year’s Palme d’Or, the most coveted prize at the Cannes Film Festival, for their film Entre les Murs.

It was a surprise win in more ways than one. Cantet’s small film, made on a limited budget, was hardly favored to leapfrog to the top prize over such big international contenders as Steven Soderbergh’s “Ché” or Clint Eastwood’s “The Changeling”. And no French film had won the Palme d’Or in 21 years-not since Maurice Pialat’s scandalous Sous le Soleil de Satan in 1987.

But despite the unlikely odds, the jury’s vote was unanimous. And maybe the triumph of the cinematic underdog wasn’t so surprising after all. This year’s jury president, Sean Penn, had publicly professed his desire to turn Cannes 2008 into “the opposite of the Oscars”, and on that basis, Cantet’s gritty, energetic little slice-of-contemporary-life-with nary a big-name star in sight-is a perfect win.

Entre les Murs (The Class) is a two-hour docu-fiction packed with rapid-fire, slangy and often comic dialogue chronicling life in an unruly classroom, where silence is anything but golden. Here, talking back to the teacher is not only permitted, it’s encouraged. How could president Penn-whose own movie debut role was the class troublemaker in Fast Times at Ridgemont High-possibly resist?

Several hours before the closing ceremony, Laurent Cantet and author/screenwriter François Bégaudeau, who also plays the role of the teacher, are holding interviews with a small group of journalists in a hotel lobby. It’s a drizzly Sunday morning in Cannes and the Croisette suddenly looks like a ghost town. Most of the festivalgoers have already departed and workmen are dismantling the glitzy beachfront decor.

Cantet, sunk into a deep leather chair, begins by explaining that he had toyed with the idea of setting a film in a school for quite some time. “I wanted to use the classroom as a sounding board, a microcosm, where issues of equality and inequality are played out,” the director explains. “I wanted it to be the story of 25 people-a teacher and his students-who didn’t choose to be together, between four walls, for an entire year.”

But the project remained on the back burner until January 2006, when Cantet met Bégaudeau, who had just published his autobiographical book Entre les Murs (Between the Walls).

Bégaudeau, 37, a journalist and cinema critic, also taught French in a junior high in Paris, and he had written about his classroom experiences from the inside. “When I read the book,” says Cantet, “I was delighted to find that for once a professor wasn’t writing in order to get back at adolescents presented as savages or idiots.”

“People have the notion that school is like a sanctuary, sheltered from the world,” he continues, “where children are taught wonderful things, like French or math. But unfortunately-or fortunately-some of these kids don’t have simple lives. They’re all from different backgrounds, and in some of their homes, the French language is never even spoken at all.” Among the film’s mix of 13- to 15-year-old students, there are kids of North African and sub-Saharan African descent; a shy, highly intelligent Chinese boy with limited French language skills; a raven-haired Goth; and a French youth who dreams of attending a top-rated high school but will never attain the required level to get in.

Indeed, one of the main issues of the film is the gap between what is traditionally considered “valuable knowledge” and the harsher realities of Paris’s hardscrabble 20th arrondissement.

“In high school,” Bégaudeau says, “we’re asked to teach Molière, which is understandable, since he epitomizes French culture. But when I taught, I found myself standing in front of kids who have never read theatrical plays-or books, for that matter-and they don’t know the world they live in very well either. So how are they supposed to relate to a play in Alexandrine verse, written three centuries ago?”

Cantet teamed up with Bégaudeau and co-screenwriter Robin Campillo and, and set down a loosely scripted story of a French class where, more often than not, the required curriculum is met with scorn. Take the imperfect subjunctive mood, for instance: “Not even my grandmother spoke like that!” complains one girl. “It’s from the Middle Ages!” another student chimes in. But while Bégaudeau’s character provokes his students, goading them to respond to the literature, he doesn’t always succeed. A discussion of The Diary of Anne Frank digresses when tough kid Souleymane, a troubled adolescent from Mali, decides he’d rather talk about the writing on his tattooed bicep.

Indeed, the film’s subtext is about the jubilation and the failure of language, which becomes a dramatic element when a semantic misunderstanding arises between the teacher and two of his female students over the highly-charged slang word pétasse, which means anything from a bimbo to a slut.

At 47, Cantet has become best known for his social dramas. His first feature film, Human Resources (1999), the story of the rifts between labor and management and father and son, earned him a César award for best first film. His second, Time Out (2001), winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, recounts the downfall of a corporate consultant (inspired by the true-life white-collar criminal Jean-Claude Roman) who is fired and gets trapped in a spiral of lies to hide the truth from his family and friends. Next, Heading South (2005), set in Haiti in the late 70s, portrayed wealthy and lonely 50-something women engaged in the sex-tourism trade, and starred Charlotte Rampling.

“I put Laurent in the same realist tradition as Jean Renoir, Maurice Pialat and Eric Rohmer,” says Bégaudeau. “He is truly interested in ordinary people.”

However, for The Class, the blend of both fictional and documentary  approaches demanded a major departure from conventional filmmaking, beginning with the actors. “Out of 50 students who auditioned, we chose 25, mainly because they were the most enthusiastic,” explains Cantet. “All during the school term we held improvisational workshops, to prepare them for the 5-week shoot.”

“Many of the kids have known each other for a long time, some since they were three years old. They live in the same neighborhood and were in the same classes. I think it’s one of the keys to the successful casting, because there’s a real trust among them.”

“When we prepared for a scene, we’d say to a student, something like ‘the teacher is going to say this and you don’t agree’. But we never wrote their exact dialogue, because we wanted them to use their own words, their own expressions.”

With three digital cameras rolling simultaneously at all times-one focused on the students, another on the teacher, and the third for digressions, or what Cantet calls “accidents of reality, like a daydreaming student fiddling with her hair, or a chair toppling over”-Cantet says he ended up with more than 150 hours of film.  “It wasn’t about choosing between good or bad scenes, because the actors were always very good-the takes were just a bit different. So it took a lot of mental gymnastics to piece it all together, like a puzzle.”

Though Cantet concedes that the world is a very different place than when he himself was in junior high, he says he had no intention of portraying “the racial unrest cliché” of the outlying French suburbs. “I purposely set the film within Paris,” he says. “These kids were only 11 years old in 2006, during the riots when the cars were burning. That really isn’t part of their world today.”

On the other hand, the film subtly exposes the pitfalls of the French national educational system. “Even though there are many joyous moments in the film, I think schools in France create a lot of exclusion. They enable a kind of sorting process-there are those who will attend university, others will be sent to vocational schools, and then there are others who fail or are expelled.”

But Entre les Murs goes beyond purely French social concerns and sparkles with universal appeal, thanks to Cantet’s subtle portrayal of complex situations. “In all my films, there are very few pure victims or guilty characters,” he muses. “They often make mistakes or do things that they’re not very proud of afterwards, and they’re never heroes.”

Cantet pauses, gazing outside the window at the unseasonably grey skies. “I try to show the world as it is, and at the same time, through a very personal point of view. Above all, I don’t ever want to make films that can be summarized in three lines.”

This one, however, might be summarized in three words: A real treat.