Film

A late-breaking Palme d’Or winner at last year’s Cannes (and one, along with second-place recipient Gomorrah, frequently dismissed as Wire lite), The Class boasts deceptively simple trappings: It’s a fiction feature with a documentary gloss, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by its star and cast mostly with nonprofessionals (who supplied some of the story lines), all operating in service of the broader cliché of the classroom as a microcosm of society.

The first half, detailing M. Marin’s French lessons, is remarkably credible, particularly in the way the character (Bégaudeau) defuses classroom tensions. (Why, his mostly minority students ask, does he use funny American names in his examples?) But it’s the film’s second half that’s subversive: In a nation committed to protocol and wary of immigrants, a teacher assumes the role of gatekeeper. The Class becomes a study in hypocrisy, with the ostensibly life-saving educator reluctant to fess up to his role in walling off a student’s potential.

In its pessimistic undercurrents and portrayal of faculty demoralization, the film is closer to Up the Down Staircase than Dangerous Minds. Certainly, it’s a less problematic view of culture clash than Cantet’s sex-tourist chronicle Heading South (2005), which never felt authentic. The camera sticks to the school grounds, giving the film a pleasing modesty of scale. And on its own, consciously limited terms, The Class is a success story.