I'll start with the good...
Last year, I saw the Palme d'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days at AFI Fest and it ended up as my favorite film of 2007. That experience alone boosted my expectations for The Class, this year's recipient of the prestigious award, to insurmountable heights.The Class certainly isn't as good as its Romanian abortion-drama predecessor, but few films are. Rest assured: this picture is an intense, involving exercise in cinema verite with terrific performances and thought-provoking social commentary. It is deserving of its already-stellar reputation.
The premise is simple: François (François Bégaudeau, playing himself in a screenplay he co-adapted from a book he wrote) is a teacher at a public high-school outside Paris that is full of troubled students, nearly all of whom are the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. The film takes place over a year and chronicles the daily problems of his François' French class, which is so rowdy and unfocused due to its members' conflicting ethnicities and hardship-filled home-lives that it rarely proves able of cracking a book for more than 10 minutes at a time.
While the story may seem dull on paper, it is riveting on film. In the vein of the nouvelle vague filmmakers that put his country on the map in the 1950s and '60s, director Laurent Cantet employs a minimalistic fly-on-the-wall approach, capturing the raw intensity of the situations that arise with bare finesse. François' class is tested repeatedly: one boy misbehaves repeatedly but the school is afraid to punish him because his father will send him back to his African homeland if he is expelled, two girls sit in on the grading-process as student representatives (common in France) and then inappropriately gossip about the dismissive things teachers say about certain students, François gets so flustered he calls said girls "skanks," et cetera. All the while, Cantet never tries to provide easy relief for his audience; he is committed to making viewers feel the conflict in plot-points.
Cantet's approach does particular justice to two of the film's main goals. Firstly, it serves as a testament to just how enormous the problem that François and the other teachers in the school face is. This is a big issue in France's political decisions right now, especially with a record-high immigrant-population, and the film's intense depiction of its severity very well may impact future legislative decisions made. Secondly, said intensity highlights how good Bégaudeau is his (apparently very personal) role. There's a moment in which he merely sits and thinks after a stubborn and frustrating after-class conversation with a student who isn't applying herself like she used to that is one of the most powerful silent-scenes I've seen in any film all year.
The Class will not only be of interest to the French; adventurous American moviegoers will find plenty to latch onto as well. The movie doesn't lack anything that a good domestic inspirational-teacher movie like Freedom Writers boasts; the themes about the uniqueness of teacher-student relationships, finding one's identity in adolescence, and using education to escape from real-world problems are all present, just not as obvious or as preachy. (This is a good thing, in my view.) The Class essentially tells a familiar story, but it does so exceptionally by stripping style down to the essentials and crating thoughtful socio-political messages. Cheers to Cantet, Bégaudeau, and co-writer Robin Campillo for making a movie that is both intelligent and entertaining. 3-1/2 Buckets out of four; screens again Sat., Nov. 8 at 10 p.m.
I'm unwilling to spend nearly as much time talking about Hunger, British videographer Steve McQueen's film debut about imprisoned Irish Republican Bobby Sands' (Michael Fassbender) fatal will-power during the 1981 IRA Hunger Strike.Hunger isn't too concerned with the historical details of the strike: Sands is provided four long takes (two of which go on for so long they'll undoubtedly be praised by film-school students even though McQueen merely employs a stationary camera) to explain the cause and his passion for it to a priest. These aren't really involving on a content-level; they are only engrossing in that they prove actor Fassbender is a more skilled thespian than his performance in 300 led us to believe. Fassbender is able to command the screen for long stretches of time, meaning he was probably once a stage actor. Keep an eye out for his name in the future.
But the rest of the movie consists almost exclusively of a bunch of shots of Sands' body as he grows progressively weaker from not eating. It's a painful and tedious experience... and not in the way McQueen wants it to be. The fact that he puts the viewer through hell proves nothing because it doesn't lend to an enhancement of the narrative. In fact, more times than not, it feels like McQueen is indulging in brutal imagery because it looks cool--he sure likes extreme close-ups of flesh--not because it portrays a hunger-strike experience in a painfully authentic manner. I tired of the experience very early on because it didn't teach me anything valuable and there was no reason for me to be taking part in it. 1 Bucket out of 4.
Posts
