-By David Noh

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There will not be a better film this year than Laurent Cantet’s The Class, which focuses on a year in a schoolroom presided over by a young teacher, Marin (François Bégaudeau). The school is in a rough Parisian neighborhood and the student body is mixed racially—black, Arab, Asian. Marin’s particular challenge is, as with every teacher, trying to instill a love of learning in these often recalcitrant adolescents, but the particular setting and makeup of his charges renders his situation extraordinary. Extraordinary, too, are the ways he deals with the students, never pandering to them and offering a kind of tough love as he fields intrusive questions from them about his own possible homosexuality and tries to give them all a sense of self-worth, as well as proper speech in a France where traditional language is dying.

But most extraordinary of all is the way Cantet has filmed this, using three cameras which capture every behavioral nuance of Marin, the students and various spontaneous occurrences. Robin Campillo’s brilliant editing fluidly interweaves the footage, giving the miraculous impression that you are seeing life really being lived from moment to moment. The film is based on a book by Bégaudeau, recounting his own teaching experience, and he and Cantet discovered their students in a Paris school, holding extensive workshops with them to probe their characters. This all gives The Class a near-documentary feel, making it a unique interweaving of fiction and reality, as when some real-life parents of the kids are also brought into the story.

Sometimes these encounters are benignly rewarding, as when a Chinese boy (Wei Huang) receives praise for his efforts, but others are stormier, like that with a stern matron and her son, Souleymane (Franck Keita), the eternal class troublemaker, whose antics have him facing expulsion, as well as a daunting parental decision to send him back to Africa. This incident escalates when, in a fit of pique, Marin verbally attacks two girls who exhibited a lack of respect during their monitoring of a teacher’s meeting to decide Souleymane’s fate. In a trice, all the bonhomie Marin has worked so hard to achieve vanishes, and we are again at war, both generationally and culturally.

That last incident functions as something of a dramatic climax, but to call it that would do a disservice to this work, which really doesn’t truck in any traditional dramatic structure. With febrile intelligence and staggering humanity, Cantet, who also did the remarkable sexual study Heading South, has captured a vital segment of modern France, in all its roiling complexity, tension and hard-won humor. Avoiding any of the easy sentimentality of past teacher movies like Goodbye, Mr. Chips or To Sir, With Love, he nevertheless makes you truly care about his people in a blessedly un-histrionic way that harkens back to the greatest work of the Italian neorealists.