This 2008 Cannes Winner Ditched Actors for the Real Deal — and Turned a Classroom Into Storytelling Gold

School dramas have a formula. From To Sir, With Love to Dead Poets Society and Freedom Writers, we are constantly watching stories about inspiring teachers that change the lives of their students. However, when we take a look at real life, it’s not hard to understand that the actual schooling process is a lot more complicated than the movies make it look like. The school system is no one’s friend, and many a child gets crushed under its complicated cogs. Still, things aren’t as bleak as The Wall‘s “Another Brick in the Wall” would have us believe. There are teachers who are indeed trying their best. Alas, they are but fallible human beings. To capture this delicate balance, a director must strip themselves of all preconceptions about what school should be like and face it as it really is. That is, perhaps, what makes a movie such as Laurent Cantet‘s The Class so special.

The winner of the 2008 Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, in a year the jury was presided over by actor and director Sean Penn, The Class was France’s nominee for the 2008 Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards. It ran against Germany’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, Austria’s Revanche, Israel’s Waltz with Bashir, and the winner, Japan’s Departures. But, looking in retrospect, it’s not hard to see that The Class is the strongest of the bunch. Often mistaken for a documentary, Cantet’s film is the most realistic depiction of what life is like in between a school’s walls ever put to film. It even gives İlker Çatak‘s 2023 examination of hierarchy inside an educational institution, The Teacher’s Lounge, a run for its money.

‘The Class’ Cast Is Made Out of Real Teachers and Students

François Bégadeau as François Marin in The Class — Image via Haut et Court

To ensure the realism of his film, Cantet had a trick up his sleeve. Instead of going for professional actors, the director cast his roster of students and teachers from a school in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris. Most of the kids in François Marin’s (François Bégadeau) inner-city class play characters with the same names as themselves, and even Mr. Marin himself is being played by his real-life counterpart: Bégadeau is an actual French teacher and the author of Entre les Murs, the 2006 novel on which the film is based. The dialogue was largely improvised, with only a few plot points and sentences marked on the screenplay written by Cantet, Bégadeau, and Robin Campillo. For instance, there is a huge drama surrounding Souleymane, an immigrant child from Mali with behavioral issues, but actor Franck Keïta was in great part allowed to come up with his own words.

“School makes everyone an actor,” Cantet told The New York Times. “The teacher is putting on a performance. The way he uses his body and his voice is an improvisation. Maybe that’s why François is such a good actor.” The director also remarked that, since most of the students were already friends from school, they had no trouble acting in front of each other.

Adrien Brody Gives One Of His Most Heartbreaking Performances in This Free-To-Stream School Drama

Brody is absolutely captivating as a compassionate teacher in this drama.

Apart from Keïta’s Souleymane, the real stars of the show are Esmeralda Ouertani’s Esmeralda and Rachel Regulier’s Khoumba, a couple of friends who create different challenges for Mr. Marin in his class. While Esmeralda is a little too excited to participate, asking questions that are often not that connected to the class’ subject matter, Khoumba seems to think any sign of interest in schoolwork is also a sign of childishness. Eager to grow up, she challenges Mr. Marin’s authority and, at some point, even writes him a heartbreaking letter about mutual respect in the classroom.

These kids challenge Mr. Marin’s ideologies about teaching. It’s clear from the get-go that he wants to make a difference in his students’ lives, but he’s frequently driven to outbursts of rage. At some point, he even insults two of the students, a brash decision that comes back to bite him in the end. Eventually, this all results in a scenario that serves as a gut-wrenching depiction of how the school system can fail those who go through it.

‘The Class’ Follows a Year in the Life of a Schoolteacher and His Students

Confined to the school itself, the plot of The Class doesn’t necessarily obey the three-act structure we have come to associate with narrative films. Browsing the movie’s page on Letterboxd, it is not hard to come across negative reviews claiming that The Class has no conflict or even no plot whatsoever. To some extent, that is true, as the film concentrates much more on painting a picture of what a year in the life of a schoolteacher and his students is like than on creating a traditional story with a beginning and a satisfying end. However, that doesn’t mean that The Class doesn’t have its fair share of drama or even that it doesn’t have a thread connecting all points of its screenplay. Namely, it is Souleymane’s story that drives the tension, even if it is interspersed with moments of relative tranquility.

There is no lesson to be learned at the end of The Class. Maybe, if you’re generous, you can say that Mr. Marin learns something from his mistakes, but that isn’t entirely true. As the movie ends, so does the school year, and life simply goes on. Some kids will make it, others will be left behind, and that’s the real tragedy of The Class. And isn’t that the real tragedy of life as well?