The Class [Laurent Cantet, 2008]

• Laurent Cantet is a smart fellow. Taking cues from the brothers who've won two Palme d'Ors in the last decade alone, he translated their hand-held, cinema verite style to an uncompromising observation of a French class at a middle school in Paris. This is not to say he "stole" their style by any means--the Dardennes certainly were not the first to keep their camera obsessively close to their characters' faces, or attempt objective realism. In fact, Cantet beat out the Dardennes' The Silence of Lorna for the Palme d'Or, so there's obviously no mimicry going on.
• If The Class seems curiously real, even for those familiar with naturalism, it's probably because it is, somewhat. Like Abbas Kiarostami, another Palme d'Or winner, Cantet blurs the line between fiction and documentary with his casting of Francois Begaudeau, who essentially adapted his own semi-autobiographical novel for the screen, and stars as his semi-self in it. Meanwhile, the students are all obviously real students, and almost all go by their real names. 
• If Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson and Mike Akel's Chalk proved that there was still nuanced or painfully comic narratives to be had from the classroom drama subgenre, Cantet's movie is out to deconstruct the narrative and instead observe the failure of a school system to its students, and remind us that the teachers are often as frustrated and confused as their pupils. The film takes place neatly over the course of exactly one school year, following Francois only while at work, and never resorting to any scenes of students outside of school to achieve sympathy for their conditions or "explain" why they act how they do. There's probably never been such a good cast of students in a film of this subgenre, likely because the actors "workshopped" their characters in Mike Leigh fashion, giving them a lot of time to get a feel for their characters and ultimately become them (if I were told every character was told simply to act as themselves, I would have believed that). The film resonates so well because these characters are so memorable, and portrayed so objectively that it's hard not to embrace them if only for their imperfectly human nature.
• While Cantet can't, and henceforth doesn't try to characterize every student in the classroom, he does a damn good job of presenting the ten or eleven of those who are the most involved, and thus the most important (in this film of course). Although it doesn't take two seconds to notice that the class is almost completely made up of low-income emigres, the movie never makes the mistake of stereotyping its characters, nor portraying the white Francois as a stereotype-giver (except in a subtle connection of Chinese with mathematics, only noticeable for the comically deadpan look given by the boy's mother). 
• It's original title, Entre les murs, translates as Between the Walls, and is indeed the motif of the film. When the last shots of the film are shown, it becomes increasingly apparent what(/who) the title is referring to.

9/wonderfully objective observation of a middle school class, furnished with memorable characters and performances