The Class
Directed by Laurent Cantet
Running Time: 128 min.
Last week I referred to the black kid in Doubt as,
“That most condescending of all social constructs: a minority.” But
this week that construction describes an entire movie, the Cannes Film
Festival Award–winning The Class. Set in a modern Parisian public school, The Class is
based on a memoir by François Bégaudeau recounting one school year
teaching inner-city immigrant youth. Bégaudeau portrays himself, but
director Laurent Cantet is responsible for the film’s reality-TV style,
employing non-professional teens to reenact the student body of
minorities.
It’s all designed to flatter the middle-class
art-film audience’s patronizing attitude toward the Third World.These
kids’ claim on the conscience of the bourgeois West invokes post-9/11
guilt—a piety so strong that it fools many liberals into mistaking
their condescension for empathy. Bégaudeau struggles to civilize these beasts—beurs from the banlieues—whose natural teenage rebellion threatens to tear down Western heritage.
Hostile
to national language and tradition, they taunt Bégaudeau’s grammar and
his sexuality.Yet he endures. Cantet lost his bearings with Heading South, an
overwrought Marxist analysis of imperialism through the menopausal
cravings of white women on the loose in the Caribbean. His sympathies
are still berserk— and purely didactic—in every scene that excuses the
second-generation students’ resistance to cultural orientation. Cantet
never critiques hip-hop youth for swallowing “radical” cant as easily
as they get Muslim tattoos or don Detroit Pistons jerseys.
(Sports
rivalry stirs vicious classroom antagonisms.) The dangers inherent in
intellectual vacillation show in Cantet’s faculty lounge scenes where
teachers—typically bourgeois— over-discuss classroom problems.The
single outburst of angered authority is patronized.
The Class is
so densely racist it justifies Bégaudeau nearly losing his job because
students protest his angry utterance of “skank” when debating a female
student. Bégaudeau brightens when his most hostile pupil says she’s
just read Plato’s The Republic. Plainly, she’s learned nothing from it, yet Cantet accepts this apple-polishing as victory.
Americans
have no business falling for this nonsense. Our school system fails due
to class and economic issues that Cantet’s racism ignores.Yet critics
who ignored the education drama Akeelah and the Bee extol
Cantet’s bald white-man’s-burden metaphor. Our imperfect democracy has
surpassed this French liberal romanticism at least since Robert
Mulligan’s 1967 film Up the Down Staircase. When Sandy Dennis’
suburban white teacher coped with the turmoil of an urban high school,
a veteran casually advised, “You can’t give up, and you can’t give them
up.They’ve been given up already.We’re their last chance. Or maybe
they’re our last chance.” Cantet doesn’t quite know how to say that. In
his conceit, Cantet essentially pities these minorities as colonial
brats. He delimits their humanity, and that’s the film’s ultimate
blackboard bungle.
smd
