Waste Management (Page 2)

There is only one pause in Laurent Cantet's The Class, and one brief scene shot outside a Parisian school. Both occur at the very beginning, when Cantet shows slim, 30-ish François Bégaudeau--by profession a public-school teacher and author, and now a movie actor--doing nothing in a cafe. The shot holds for perhaps five seconds; then Bégaudeau resolutely knocks back a cup of espresso (as if by an act of will) and heads out the door, purposeful, wide awake and moving on the balls of his feet.

From that moment on, The Class is as caffeinated as its protagonist, and with good reason. The semi-autobiographical character Bégaudeau is playing, François Marin, is plunging into a new year of teaching grammar and composition to people who don't necessarily want to learn them.

His pupils are a wriggling, fidgeting, babbling, argumentative, highly opinionated group of 13- and 14-year-olds--some two dozen in all, whose families come from Morocco, Mali, China, the Caribbean and in a few cases even France. When François makes up a sentence to illustrate the use of a word, his students demand to know why he always chooses weird names like Bill, instead of normal ones like Aïssa. When he tries to justify teaching the subjunctive imperfect, they make him admit that nobody uses it except people like him. And then, from the boys in the back row, comes a random inquiry about his sexual orientation. In most American movies where conflicts of race and class play out in the schoolroom, the teacher successfully smothers these differences under the cozy, homemade quilt of his good will. But this is France, and François has no fear of sharp distinctions. His pedagogical method is to push his students and then to shove, so that he's always on the verge of going too far with them--or finally steps over the line.

If this is a high-risk strategy for a teacher, The Class itself is no less daring. The nonprofessionals playing the young characters are all real students, who improvised their lines within situations that Cantet, Bégaudeau and screenwriter Robin Campillo invented. The kids' volleys with François were filmed like a tennis match--one player on this side of the net, all the rest on the other--which multiple cameras had to capture on the fly, without getting in the way of the ball. As you watch this exhilarating back-and-forth, it dawns on you that an ethically complex, emotionally troubling plot has taken shape; and you realize, with astonishment, that Cantet waited an hour to let it emerge.

The wonder of The Class is that, in its making, it was so much like a public school: full of pent-up energies and democratic self-contradictions, procedural constraints and scheduling hurdles. You'd think something like this would be unmanageable, yet this Class works beautifully.

* * *

As someone who has forbidden his children to interrupt him at the computer--if they're so damned hungry, let them heat their own frozen peas--I can appreciate Henry Selick's Coraline, an intricate mechanical device built to punish any kid who dares feel neglected. Through the use of vivid 3-D animation, Coraline teasingly fulfills the title character's fantasy of entering an alternative world, where she has attentive, fun-loving parents who cook. Then the movie turns on the little ingrate, impressing on her in freakish detail the error of her dissatisfaction. A novel by Neil Gaiman is credited as the source of the horror, but "In the Penal Colony" seems as likely an origin for this clattering tattoo of instruction.

Should I feed my kids into the machine? Granted, they're distracting and apt to complain; but they do know that Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas is fun and will recognize that Coraline is not. I'll give 'em a reprieve, on grounds of good taste.

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