cannes 2008

A quite different competition was going on last weekend. It wasn’t broadcast live to Europe and beyond, but film lovers are surely keen to see the winner of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. An unruly Parisian classroom film called Entre Les Murs (or The Class in English) won the Palme d’Or this year but promises to be a completely different kettle of fish than another recent feel-good French classroom film, Être et avoir. The Guardian today meets the director to find out the story behind the film, check it out if you are curious.

Top of the class

Tuesday May 27th, 2008

Lanie Goodman, The Guardian

When the French director Laurent Cantet put up posters in Dolto College, a secondary school in a rough, working-class neighbourhood of Paris, to advertise castings for his film Entre les Murs (The Class), little did he imagine that the 25 adolescents who made the cut would later be standing beside him, grinning dazedly under the glaring stage lights as he accepted the 2008 Palme d’Or award. Sunday night’s ceremony marked the first time in 21 years that a French film has won the Cannes festival’s most coveted prize. In the spirit of jury president Sean Penn’s professed desire to make Cannes “the opposite of the Oscars”, Cantet’s film is the perfect win. It’s two hours of docu-fiction packed with rapid-fire, slangy dialogue, chronicling life in a Paris classroom where silence is anything but golden. How could Penn – who made his name as a class troublemaker in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High – possibly resist?

Cantet, 47, specialises in social dramas. His last film, Heading South (2005), portrayed lonely fiftysomething women engaged in sexual tourism in Haiti. His other movies include Human Resources (1999), about the rift between labour and management, and Time Out (2001), about the downfall of a corporate consultant. Cantet had had the idea of setting a film in a school for some time. “I came up with the idea of doing a film about life in a secondary school where I’d never go beyond the classroom, and use it as a sounding board, a microcosm, where issues of equality and inequality are played out,” he says.

“I wanted it to be the story of 25 people – a teacher and his students – who didn’t choose to be together, but are between four walls for an entire year.”

But it wasn’t until Cantet met François Bégaudeau, who wrote the autobiographical novel on which The Class is based and who plays the teacher in the film, that the project began to take shape. “François had lived the experience from the inside,” Cantet says. “Plus, I was delighted to find that, for once, a professor wasn’t writing in order to get back at adolescents presented as savages or idiots. People have the notion that school is like a sanctuary, sheltered from the world, where children are taught wonderful things. But unfortunately – or fortunately – these kids don’t have simple lives. They’re all different races, with different backgrounds. In some homes, the French language is never even spoken.”

International audiences may compare Cantet’s classroom drama to Nicolas Philibert’s documentary Etre et Avoir, which proved a surprise hit in 2002 – but not if Cantet has anything to say about it. “Etre et Avoir is not really a film I could identify with,” he says. “Philibert shows us a little class in the country where kids of all ages are mixed together. It’s not at all representative of our era. And the teacher is the opposite of what François plays in the film. He has enormous power over the kids and, frankly, he’s not very nice. In a sense, The Class is a response to that kind of abuse of power.”

In The Class, the pupils often react to the curriculum with scorn. Take the imperfect subjunctive tense, for instance: “Not even my grandmother spoke like that!” complains one girl. “It’s from the middle ages,” another student chimes in. Among the students, many of whom are of African descent, there’s a shy, intelligent Chinese boy with limited skills in French; a raven-haired goth; and a white French youth who dreams of attending a prestigious secondary school.

“Schools in France create a lot of exclusion,” Cantet says. “They enable a kind of sorting process – there are those who will attend university, others will be sent to vocational schools, and then there are others who fail or are expelled.”

It is exactly this kind of complexity that most interests him as a director. “When I make films, I try to see the world as it is and, at the same time, have an intimate relationship to the world,” he says. “I don’t ever want to make films that can be summarised in three lines.”