Excellent but underrated film

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

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.

When you think about it, a movie that had obtained the Palme d'Or award would make you think for a moment that what you're about to watch is absolutely amazing. Unbelievably, this isn't true for this movie! A show about school that's centered on a teacher and his students… along with the almost supernatural amount of patience the teacher has with his rowdy students makes up what you're currently interested in watching.Entre Les Murs, other known as The Class, is a dramatic film made in 2008 that was created to express what the school life of some teachers in the outskirts of Paris would look like during the year, and how the students might react to them. Starring François Bégaudeau, the author of the book that inspired this story, we look into the life of a struggling French teacher as he goes through the twists and turns of a school year. Through the director, Laurent Cantet, and the very teachers and middle school students in the school where the story takes place, you will glimpse into the chaos that goes on in order to keep a class in check as well as trying to motivate them to do their best. Most of this film takes place in a plain, ordinary classroom: M. Marin's French class. M. Marin, the main character of this story, is an abnormally patient man that tries to reason with his students and get to know them instead of punishing them for their constant rude behavior. This doesn't last very long, especially since the kids he teaches are a diverse group of troubled kids, including immigrants from China and Africa. Throughout this story, you'll get a feel of most of what goes on during a school year in France, including the parent-teacher conferences and teacher meetings involving the students. While watching, you will be most drawn to the heated interactions between M. Marin and his students, and how everything continues to spiral out of control all year long.A key point to mention in this film would have to be the lack of a developed plot. Everything piles on top of each other and seems to get nowhere throughout the entire year. Even the most interesting conflict of the story wasn't resolved in a proper way, so in a way everything revolves in a sort of circle, repeating it over and over. Another thing to mention would be the lack of music, that makes it more natural but also more painful to watch. There's no added suspense or feeling of chaos that there could have been through the power of music, leaving the silences to be awkward or to be filled with constant chatter.In my opinion, I would have like to have started watching it during the middle of the film. That's when the pace starts to pick up and things get more entertaining, if only a little bit. It's not a bad story, once you get past the fact there's no plot and it's just the same sequence happening over and over again, but other than that I'm surprised it even became a film in the first place. It makes one wonder what the director or producer was thinking when they came up with the idea of making this a movie based on its book. I would not recommend this for anyone who wasn't curious about what school is like in the outskirts of towns or cities in France. So, naturally I would expect 16 year olds and above—either students or teachers themselves—to watch and even remotely enjoy this film, since they might be curious about what the lives of people in schools from other countries might look like. They would be able to make any connections between the schools in their home country and the school in France that no one else could, meaning they would get the plot-less chaos that goes on in Entre Les Murs more than any other group of people. Senseless and unable to follow at times, students and teachers have to live that sort of torment every day, which may in itself be the reason for wanting to watch this film.

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.

THE CLASS (2008)An interesting blend of documentary and drama film.Interesting in the style it creates, not interesting in the story it tells until the climax. I found The Class struggling to hold my focus for the first 90 minutes. I aggressively thought, "I get the point, can we move on?" The last 20 minutes however are a blistering collection of scenes that creates a riveting controversy. The Class doesn't pave a path for us to follow during the money moments, it's up to our beliefs to shape our opinion.Grade: B+Rating: 7.5