François Bégaudeau in The Class

Laurent Cantet’s The Class is the ultimate anti-inspirational teacher movie: Its central educator can inspire his students only to hate him. Monsieur Marin’s victory, laboriously achieved, is to rouse his Parisian high-school classroom from bored hostility to active revolt. If the labor and the boredom are equally persuasive, that’s due in no small part to the movie’s casting—Marin is played by François Bégaudeau, the real-life teacher whose memoir sparked Cantet’s film, and his pupils have been snagged from French schools. Together, the actors and the director have improvised a semester-long bull session, so exquisitely dull it will transport you back to your own spitball-throwing days, and so exactingly structured that those who brave the torpor will discover it has indeed been character-building.

Winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes, The Class was up for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film—and lost Sunday to an insipid-looking Japanese thing called Departures. This should not have been a surprise: Reports suggest The Class was nominated under duress, and the Academy has always favored those overseas pictures that comfort us with the notion that, deep down, we’re all the same. The Class points to unbroachable differences. This is the Paris of race riots and, yes, class warfare, a reluctantly multicultural society that no longer knows how to assimilate immigrants, and has lost any confidence that it should. Bégaudeau warns a fellow teacher his students are not ready to read Voltaire; in fact, they have moved beyond a willingness to recognize the imperialist principles of basic verb conjugation. When Marin tries to diagram the sentence “Bill enjoys a succulent cheese” (can there be a more irreducibly French sentiment than that?), they immediately object: Who is this “Bill”? We don’t know anyone named Bill.

The kids are gradually coaxed to express themselves—the most hostile, a young man from Mali named Suleyman (Franck Keïta), takes sensitive photographs of his family—but they also gather that they can mau-mau this determinedly liberal guy at the chalkboard. He thinks he’s seducing them into learning. And then he cracks—just for a moment, with just one word (“skanks,” actually), but it’s enough to provoke outrage at his arrogance. By the end of The Class’ session, education has been reduced to a hostage standoff—and it’s hard to say who’s holding whom captive. PG-13.