Highly acclaimed French movie ‘The Class’ is an engaging, gritty look at the life of a teacher and his pupils in a disadvantaged Parisian suburb. Will it teach us all a lesson?

THE CEREMONIAL ritual before an evening gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival begins as the film's director leads the principal cast members – rarely more than five or six of them – up the red carpeted steps lined by uniformed gendarmes. At the world premiere of The Class( Entre les Murs) in Cannes last May, director Laurent Cantet brought all 25 teen actors from the film.

None of them had ever acted before and they were giddy with excitement as they ascended the steps to the Festival Palais while thousands of onlookers cheered them and hordes of photographers and TV crews captured the occasion for posterity. For the youngsters, this experience was a world away from the routine of their daily lives in Paris.

As the film’s closing credits rolled, the 2,000-strong audience rose to their feet to give the director and his visibly moved cast a sustained standing ovation. Just over 24 hours later, Cantet brought them all back on stage when he was given the festival’s most coveted award, the Palme d’Or. Joy was unconfined when jury president Sean Penn acclaimed this “amazing, amazing film”. The excitement of the young cast was palpable – and infectious.

Substantially improvised through a workshop process, this fine, thoughtful and revelatory film follows a year in the lives of a teacher and his 14-year-old pupils at a Paris school. As it addresses the hopes, dreams, failures and family circumstances of that multi-racial class, the film presents a microcosm of contemporary France.

It's based on a book by François Bégaudeau, a 36-year-old teacher who wrote it while on leave of absence from his job, during which time he established himself as a cultural commentator on television and a football columnist for Le Monde. Bégaudeau plays the central role of the teacher in The Classwith such charisma that he may never need to return to the classroom.

The film takes its French title from his novel, Entre les Murs, which translates literally as "between the walls". That is apt in the context of a film that never moves outside the school where it's set. Bégaudeau allows his character to be depicted as a man with a capacity for making mistakes, and his portrayal is far removed from the inspirational teacher so often found in such scenarios. His fictional students are similarly drawn as complicated characters, alternately prompting the viewer's sympathy and disapproval.

The Classis the fourth film from Cantet, a 48-year-old director from whom we have come to expect the unexpected after his acute pictures of industrial conflicts (in Human Resources), a businessman's elaborate plan to conceal his newly unemployed status from his family ( Time Out) and middle-aged women as predatory sex tourists in Haiti ( Heading South).

"Just before making Heading South, I came up with the idea of doing a film about life in a junior high school," Cantet explains. "In that context, I wanted to address issues of equality or inequality in regard to opportunity, work and power, cultural and social integration and exclusion."

A year later, on the publicity circuit for the French release of Heading South, Cantet met Bégaudeau, who was promoting his book, Entre les Murs. "His discourse was a counter-attack to the indictment on today's schools," Cantet says. "For once, a teacher was not writing to get back at adolescents presented as savages or idiots. I read the book, and I immediately had the feeling that it would add to my initial project in two ways.

“First, there was the material, the documentary support it needed, and which I set off to create myself by going to spend some time in a junior high school. Secondly, I was inspired by the character of François, by his direct relationship with his students. He summarised and incarnated the different aspects of teachers that I had first imagined. ”

Cantet found all his young cast at the same school in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. With one exception, the parents in the film are the real-life parents of the pupils in the film. And apart from Bégaudeau, all of the teachers in the film are employed at the same school.

“We ran open workshops and all the kids of the fourth and third level could participate,” Cantet says. “Not counting those who came just once, we saw around 50 students. Almost all the ones who make up the class in the film are the ones who stayed with us for the entire year.”

During the course of a school year, that class took shape. Bégaudeau, who participated in all the workshops, notes that most films about adolescents depict them as monosyllabic. "For us, without doubt, the dominant force of The Classis the loquacious and lively adolescent, rather than melancholy and inhibited," he says. "The film deals with how the lacunae of language affect everyone. All the students are susceptible to masterful moments of talk, but this can be derailed at any moment – not only for the students, but also for the teacher."

Cantet was determined that his film would not be didactic. “If one is searching for a pedagogic position in this film, then that’s absolutely fine with me,” he says. “When the teacher speaks to the students as he would to adults, that might seem tough, but it’s often more insulting if he had handled them with kid gloves. This is a way of recognising their active role in the classroom arena.

“The same holds true for the use of irony, which is a way to solicit an adolescent’s ability to decode. François is not shy about open confrontation with his students and that seems completely respectful to me because they are considered as worthwhile interlocutors. His teaching technique consists of digging into students – even when it might be painful – to show them their reasoning is too short to be acceptable as it is. If you’re wondering about democracy in the classroom, it is in these moments that it exists.”

Drawing on his own experiences as a teacher, Bégaudeau observes that “a school constantly creates wonderful situations”. He continues: “But we all know at the same time that it is, in the end, discriminatory, unequal, and it fabricates reproduction. This tension was at the basis of the film. More generally, I find the same kind of tension in my favourite films.”

• The Class opens in Cineworld, Parnell Street, Dublin on Friday

Teachers close up

Very few professions have been treated with more empathy in movies than teachers. The tradition has been to depict them as liberal idealistsready to rock the boat and risk losing their jobs for the sake of their students – and for the actors playing them to receive Oscar nominations.

The most familiar examples include the dedicated but relatively unorthodox educators played by Sidney Poitier(noble in To Sir, With Love), Maggie Smith(pursed-lipped in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) and Robin Williams(simpering in Dead Poets Society) Or, when it comes to school principals, Robert Donatand Peter O'Toolein the two versions of Goodbye Mr Chips.

Even when there has been a startling exception such as Iain Glen'sscarily convincing sadist at an Irish institution for boys in Song for a Raggy Boy, there was a concerned fellow teacher ( Aidan Quinn) who stood up to him.

Some notable recent movies have been less conventional and more complicated. Charlie Bartlett, released on DVD next Monday, features Robert Downey Jr as an over-zealous principal with a drink problem. Half Nelsonupturns the tables by having a 13-year-old pupil ( Shareeka Epps) come to the rescue of a young teacher ( Ryan Gosling) in a spiral of drug addiction.

And in the 1960s-set, but topical Doubt Meryl Streepplays an intimidating nun doggedly pursuing a priest ( Philip Seymour Hoffman) she suspects of sexually abusing a schoolboy. It goes without saying that both actors were up for Oscars last Sunday night.

Michael Dwyer