The Class

Rating: M
Running time: 130 mins

Francois and his fellow teachers prepare for a new year at a high school in a tough neighborhood. Armed with the best intentions, they brace themselves to not let discouragement stop them from trying to give the best education to their students.

Cultures and attitudes often clash in the classroom, a microcosm of contemporary France. As amusing and inspiring as the teenaged students can be, their difficult behavior can still jeapordize any teacher's enthusiasm for the low-paying job.

Francois insists on an atmosphere of respect and diligence. Neither stuffy nor severe, his extravagant frankness often takes the students by surprise. But his classroom ethics are put to the test when his students begin to challenge his methods...

The Class

An Interview with Laurent Cantet and Francois Begaudeau

by Philippe Mangeot
In the Beginning
Laurent Cantet. Just before making Vers le sud (Heading South), I came up with the idea of doing a film about life in a junior high school. Very quickly, the project defined itself to never leave the establishment's enclosure. At the time, more and more people were speaking about making a "sanctuary" of schools. I wanted to show the opposite : a sounding board, a microcosm of the world, where issues of equality or inequality - in regards to opportunity, work and power, cultural and social integration and exclusion - play out concretely. Of note, I had developed a scene about disciplinary counseling, which I saw as a kind of junior high "black box". At the time of Heading South?s release, I met Francois who was presenting his new book, Entre les murs (Between the Walls) at that time. Hisdiscourse was a counterattack to the indictment on today's schools : for once, a professor was not writing in order to get back at adolescents presented as savages or idiots. I read the book, and I immediately had the feeling that it would add to my initial project in two ways : first, material, the documentary support it needed, and which I set off to create myself by going to spend some time in a junior high school. Secondly, I was inspired by the character of Francois, by his direct relationship with his students. He summarized and incarnated the different aspects of teachers that I had first imagined.

Francois Begaudeau. The aim of my book was to document one school year, sticking close to daily experiences. So there was no clear narrative line, no fictional plot centered around any one particular event. There were disciplinary meetings, but they were mostly events among many which followed their course. With this material, Laurent and his co-screenwriter Robin Campillo extracted the storyline that they were interested in. My book was the result of situations Laurent and Robin chose some of these to mold into fictional form. They did not choose "characters" in the strict sense of the term they constructed them, sometimes by grafting together several kids from the book.

Laurent Cantet. We did not want our narrative thread to be obvious immediately. We wanted the characters to develop progressively without really seeing them coming. The film is firstly a story of life in a classroom, the life of a classroom : a community of 25 people who did not choose one another, but who have been called upon to be together and work together between four walls for an entire year. Souleymane is first seen as merely another student of this classroom, equal to the others. After an hour of chronicle, a story takes shape and he is the center of it. Only in retrospect do we realize that everything was already in place before.

Francois Begaudeau. During the writing of the script, I intervened mostly as a fact checker. Some episodes might have worked fine in the narrative sense, but they seemed improbable to me in the real world of the school system. So I suggested adjustments.

Laurent Cantet. We wrote an initial summary, a backbone of the film, destined to be irrigated and modified throughout the year of preparation according to a plan I had already tried out in Ressources humaines (Human Resources). The idea was to use an existing school and during the filmmaking process, to integrate all the players of academic life. The first door that we knocked on was that of the Francoise Dolto Junior High in Paris' 20th arrondissement. It was the right one (we would have filmed there, if the school wasn?t undergoing construction). All the adolescents in the film are students at Dolto all the teachers teach there, including Julie Athenol is the counselor and Mr. Simonet is the assistant principal. With the exception of Souleymane?s mother, whose role is the most fabricated, the parents in the film are those of the students in real life.