Laurent Cantet is one of the most daring and stimulating filmmakers to come out of Europe in the past decade, and he keeps challenging himself. Cantet's movies (Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South), contemporary social dramas that he casts with a mix of trained actors and nonprofessionals, explore issues and anxieties--about work, class, gender, aging--that most films shy away from, and they do it without seeming dry or messagey. His newest film, which will be released in America this weekend under the English language title The Class, is his most ambitious project to date. Based on the book Entre les murs ("Between the Walls") by François Bégaudeau, a 37-year-old former teacher turned novelist and essayist (and film critic), it's a high school movie like no other. Working from a script credited to himself, Bégaudeau, and his own regular screenwriting collaborator, Robin Campillo, Cantet gathered together a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to represent the multicultural classroom presided over by their teacher, played by Bégaudeau. He made some real finds, including the mouthy sparkplug Esméralda Ouertani and Franck Keita, who plays Souleymane, the angriest and most defiantly unreachable of the kids. Once everything was in place, they worked together for a year, with their scenes monitored by three high-definition cameras. (One cameraman focused on the teacher, the second on the kids, and the third was hired to keep an eye out for the happy accidents.) The result is a movie that's bristlingly alive and full of surprises--not the least of which are provided by Bégaudeau's instructor, a hotshot charmer who badly wants the kids to see him as a cool older dude rather than a stuffy instructional figure, and who isn't always able to maintain perspective when faced with a choice between meeting a troubled, needy kid halfway and preserving his own self-image and ego. The Class, which won the Palme d'or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, is arriving in theaters just in time to confirm its status as one of the best pictures of the year.
SCREENGRAB: So, directing your leading man in this movie, you got to tell a film critic what to do. That must have been fun.
LAURENT CANTET: When he was in front of the camera, he was not a critic anymore. He was very busy, not just because he was acting himself, but also guiding the scene from within the scene, guiding the children to go where we wanted them to go. He had to think of all that while we were filming.
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