cast of the French film "The Class" (Palme d'Or winner at Cannes 2008) 

I watched the French film "The Class" last night and found it engaging and thought-provoking. The story is about a French middle-school teacher and his students in a modern neighborhood in Paris. A neighborhood mostly filled with immigrant families from all over the world. 

As I have said in this space before, I am a retired English teacher from British Columbia, Canada. I taught kids this same age (13-15 years old) for most of my 33 years in the profession, along with some older kids as well. 

What I found thought-provoking about the film was how sensitively it captured the mores of modern day France and what those mores reveal about the deeper texture of the nation. 

                          

                                                                          Francois Begaudeau 



At several moments in the film, I really envied the teacher, M. Marin, played by French star, Francois Begaudeau. When he was having uncomfortable or even nasty confrontation with a student or group of students, he was able to fall back on a level of respect for teachers that is assumed, apparently, in the French school system, even in some of their roughest schools. I had to deal with worse on a few occasions, I am certain, but the level of respect granted teachers in Canada just is, apparently, not as high as that granted to teachers in France. In addition, Marin gets away with a kind of continuous sarcastic repartee that, I suppose, is meant to keep students a little scared of him, but, as the film faithfully showed, such an attitude on the part of a teacher nearly always makes the tension in the room worse and the rumblings of revolt more frequent.

In the character's defense, he clearly knows his subject (French) thoroughly, and underneath his sometimes brittle exterior, he does love kids - far more than several of his colleagues in the staff room. Teaching is a difficult profession, especially at the age level of the students that Marin teaches. It is not for most of the people in society or even most of the people who think they are going to take it up as a profession. If your self-esteem is even a bit shaky, teenagers have an instinct for the jugular, and if you are not knowledgeable of your subject or you really don't know how to handle young teens, then expecting sympathy from them is like the gazelle asking the lioness for compassion. It isn't going to happen. 

On the other hand, the rewards can be amazing. One does not tend to have a lot of epiphany moments, but kids can be very funny at times. Most of all, one has the sense that one is doing something that matters and is going to leave the world a little better place after one is gone. 

But what I consider to be the major insight of my enjoyment of this film last night was that as I was watching it, I realized that though M. Marin's culture had some major features in common with my own, it also differed markedly in many ways. Teachers having a glass of wine at lunch. Kids being a touch overawed by teachers. The deep level of gratitude in many of the parents of the kids, parents just glad to be out of the places they have come from and sending their kids to a good school. The writing, direction, acting, editing - even the costumes, make-up, lighting, etc. - were all totally convincing and engaging. I was into the story and unaware of the craft that lay behind it for nearly all of the film, which is what good film should do.  

The largest insight here then is this: the values, emotions, sympathies, frustrations, etc. of a culture are not beyond the understanding of those who come from other cultures. We are all human beings. If you cut us, as Shakespeare's Shylock so accurately says, we all bleed. 

I could cite literally thousands of examples of moments in film, music, art, literature, and so on in which viewers/listeners are deeply stirred by the emotion being communicated, even when they are from entirely different cultures. A good film makes an audience out of a bunch of spectators. One out of many, in other words. 

The incommensurability or incompatibility of the various cultures of the world is a central myth of postmodernism and it is simply wrong. Full stop. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, friends, have a lovely day anyway.  


   

                              pleading child (Jackie Coogan in the title role of Chaplin's "The Kid", 1921)


   

                 young love (Clare Danes and Leonardo di Caprio in "Romeo and Juliet" (1996)






With Rue My Heart Is Laden                (A. E. Housman) 

With rue my heart is laden  
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden  
And many a lightfoot lad. 

By brooks too broad for leaping  
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping  
In fields where roses fade.