A still from Laurent Catnet’s film The Class [original French title: Entre les murs]
Have you noticed how many and how many recent fiction films look like documentaries, or are inspired by documentaries? I recently wrote about Milk – up for several Oscars – which borrows many scenes from the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Last fall I saw a marvellous fiction film which had many scenes with a purely documentary quality, Tulpan, a story from the life of sheep herders on the Kazakh steppes, by Sergei Dvortsevoy. And one of my favourite films this year, nominated for best foreign film at the Oscars, is the French film The Class, by Laurent Cantet (Entre les murs is the French title). The director came upon a reality-inspired novel by François Begaudeau, a teacher in a ‘difficult’ multiracial school in the suburbs of Paris, describing some of the challenges he was up against. Cantet then organized improvisation groups with actual college students and did a combination of casting and training, until he was able to put together his own fictional class. The students drew upon their own experiences to develop their characters. The result is surprisingly convincing, subtle but dramatic, and very documentary-like. It got the ‘Golden Palm’ award at Cannes.
A frame from Nicolas Philibert’s documentary Être et avoir [‘To Be and to Have‘]
Seeing this film reminded me of two other excellent documentaries which also did nothing more than spend a year in class, but did it well. There was the touching Être et avoir (To Be and to Have) by Nicolas Philibert, shot in a small class in a primary school in France, which had a long run in theatres there and in many other countries. The film got additional press coverage as the main character, the marvelously attentive school teacher Georges Lopez who showed another side of his personality and claimed large sums of money from the producers after the film was successful. And there was La Classe de Madame Lise, a film shot in the multicultural neighborhood of Mile-End in Montreal, nearby where I live. Directed by Sylvie Groulx and produced by Galafilm, the film got a Genie for best doumentary in 2006.
(Another Oscar-nominee for best foreign film this year is Waltz with Bashir, a hybrid, combining documentary and animation.)
An image from La Classe de Madame Lise – a movie by Sylvie Groulx
Thanks to Jorge Bustos-Estefan for help with this blog.
