March 20, 2009

"The Class"

An excerpt from my movie review in The American Conservative:
“The Class,” a slice-of-life drama tracking a year in an inner city Parisian junior high school, has been greeted rapturously, winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The critical acclaim stems mostly from “The Class” not being Hilary Swank’s 2007 “Freedom Writers” or all those other tiresome Nice White Lady movies in which heroic teachers overcome “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and turn their charges into Nobel Laureates.

In contrast, this French film offers a refreshingly realistic depiction of the frustrations of teaching. It’s not wholly plausible—as in all school movies, there is only a single class in “The Class”—but it’s almost unique in suggesting that student quality matters.

“The Class” is based on an autobiographical novel by schoolteacher François Bégaudeau. In the manner of WWII hero Audie Murphy, who played himself in the film version of his memoir “To Hell and Back,” Bégaudeau portrays a teacher named M. Marin. “The Class” could be called “To Heck and Back” because “inner city” doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Paris as it does in Detroit. The French like their cities, so the riotous public housing projects are out in Paris’s dreary suburbs. The Parisian 14-year-olds in “The Class” aren’t gun-packing gangbangers, as in Hollywood movies. They’re just mouthy adolescents, lazy, not terribly bright, and full of ressentiment at the dominance of elitist French culture.

M. Marin’s French literature class is half-French and half-minority, with the unrulier Muslims, black and white, absorbing most of his attention. The smartest and most respectful student is a Chinese immigrant, while the worst troublemaker is Souleymane from Mali in sub-Saharan Africa. One well-spoken lad who hopes to win admission to the elite Lycée Henri IV goes largely ignored in the turmoil caused by his less intelligent classmates, who constantly monitor whether they are being disrespected, so they can get off task. Griping about being dissed is more fun than being forced to reveal to the other kids that they can’t do the work. Marin banters with them, but he’s too genteel to thrive amidst all the dominance struggles.

Now in his fifth year, Marin is no longer an idealist. When a naive colleague suggests that Marin should assign Voltaire’s Candide, he demurs, “The Enlightenment will be tough for them.” Marin tries to get the class to read The Diary of Anne Frank instead (which, in “Freedom Writers,” turns teacher Erin Gruwell’s slum students into prodigies of literary creativity), but it mostly annoys Marin’s heavily Muslim class.

Read the rest in the magazine.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks much more interesting than it could have been.

Black Sea said...

Somewhat reminiscent of a conversation I had years ago with a former high school teacher in one of America's drearier, but not desparately bad, "inner city" schools. She said the students had routinely chided her for being naive enough to become a teacher, and mocked her supposedly low pay, this despite the fact that she probably made substantially more than any of the kids' parents.

After a few years, she moved on to something else. But she did confirm what I've heard from others in this situation: if you could remove the worst 10% of "students" from these classrooms, the other kids, many of whom do want to learn, would be much better situated to do so.

Anonymous said...

Why does The American Conservative's site now look exactly like National Review's?

Anonymous said...

Remember Michelle Pfeiffer(sp?) in that moronic video manfully pulling up a chair(sitting on the chair backwards of course-cuz she means bidness!) and rappin' with Coolio? Seeing the work that her idiot huband Michael Kelly has done they must be one very SWPL couple!

Anonymous said...

"josh said...

Remember Michelle Pfeiffer(sp?) in that moronic video manfully pulling up a chair(sitting on the chair backwards of course-cuz she means bidness!) and rappin' with Coolio? Seeing the work that her idiot huband Michael Kelly has done they must be one very SWPL couple!"

I liked the way Florence Henderson did it better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrowbOGZJwg