"The Class": Students put their teacher to the test in riveting French film

"The Class" begins like a standard classroom drama, complete with familiar inspirational moments and clever back-and-forth banter between a smart teacher and a feisty group of inner-city teenage students.

If the language weren't French, if the camerawork and editing weren't distinctly European in style, you might think you'd wandered into a remake of "Dead Poets Society" or "Freedom Writers."

But in the final stretch, "The Class" turns into every teacher's worst nightmare. It's also pretty rough on the students, who face more than expulsion if they lack discipline and fail to measure up.

A tough kid named Souleymane (Franck Keita) sees his options quickly narrowing as he spars with his teacher, François Marin (François Bégaudeau). He wonders if he'll be sent to Guantánamo Bay if he questions the man's sexual orientation. But he's more likely to be sent home to his village in Mali.

Marin's students clearly can't relate to his lessons in French grammar and his insistence that they read aloud from Anne Frank's diary. One lost child, fearing a future in vocational school, chooses to tell Marin that she's learned nothing from him.

Although the story is seen mostly from the viewpoint of the teachers, it's the kids who begin to gain our sympathy. They're insolent and they clearly aren't doing much to advance their educational opportunities, but Marin loses control to such a degree that we wonder who owns the moral high ground.

An Oscar nominee for best foreign film — and the top prizewinner at last year's Cannes Film Festival — "The Class" is the latest thought-provoker from writer-director Laurent Cantet, who dealt so incisively with the perils of unemployment in "Time Out" and "Human Resources."

This time he's working with a group of persuasive but nonprofessional actors, including Bégaudeau, who is essentially playing himself. The documentary-style script, partly written by Bégaudeau, is based on his autobiographical book, "Entre le murs," which made extensive use of the author's classroom experiences.

Using three cameras and relying heavily on improvisation and reaction shots to question the clichés of classroom movies (the Anne Frank episode is like a twisted version of the same scene in "Freedom Writers"), Cantet has created a deceptively simple film that gradually deconstructs a Hollywood genre.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com