However tyrannical the reign of superheroes and special effects over the box office, naturalism, even hypernaturalism, is not dead as a cinematic style. Witness two recent films.
The Class, a French Oscar nominee for best foreign-language picture of 2008 and the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is certainly an antidote to education-themed weepies such as Freedom Writers, Stand and Deliver, and To Sir, with Love, in which teachers oozing compassion and urging self-respect win the hearts of a roomful of delinquents and wean them away from drugs and gangland wars by...oh, you know the drill, by having them sign contracts to do several hours of homework each week, read Anne Frank’s diary (this gets assigned in The Class, too, but no one seems to get much out of it), and—this is the clincher—write “honest” essays about their families, neighborhoods, hopes, and dreams. Result? Though at least one student winds up riddled with bullets (a wake-up call for the others), everyone else passes finals, some go to college, and all live happily ever after.
The Class will have none of this. For one thing, François Marin, the teacher-protagonist, isn’t really much of a teacher, though he always retains our sympathy. He is played, not by an actor, but by an actual teacher, François Bégaudeau, who wrote the novel that inspired director Laurent Cantet to do this project. Though he’s obviously playing a version of himself, Bégaudeau admirably refuses to portray himself as a repository of tough-love wisdom. The movie François comes across as something of a hothead who constantly lets his pupils lead him off topic (his subject is French grammar and literature) and indulges in slanging matches during the rare occasions when he tries to enforce discipline. One critic thought this disorder was the outcome of François’ being “a big booster of the Socratic method...who constantly needles his students to examine their own beliefs on everything from racial politics to sexuality.” Nonsense. The Socratic method is supposed to lead students to wisdom or at least critical thinking, and therefore needs a debating place that allows focus on the matter at hand. Here, the back-and-forth leads to nothing but anger and snottiness and, finally, the expulsion of a student from Mali who may also be deported because of the expulsion.
François is every bit as caring as Sidney Poitier in To Sir, with Love, but there’s no movie-star magnetism here to transfix and transform his charges. Rather, Bégaudeau moves us with the utter reality of his idealism, his vulnerability, volatility, and frequent intemperance. Though this is certainly a real acting performance and not mere behavior caught by the camera, what the viewer takes away isn’t thespian fireworks but the impression of a man we wish we knew so that (among other things) we could argue with him.
To be sure, the students do the arguing for us. What a bunch they are, lovable and maddening all at once—just like real teenagers. These African, Asian, and Algerian kids, collectively the inheritors of France’s colonial past and (often) the victims of France’s peculiarly mixed feelings about multiculturalism, may not always be scholars but they are definitely players. They know very well that even if they achieve top marks and eventual citizenship, French society will never embrace most of them, and that rewarding jobs do not await them unless the gods are capriciously kind. To underline this, the script singles out the circumstances of Wei, probably the best student, with impeccable manners and study habits. He loses his very caring mother when immigration officials find she’s in the country illegally, and the boy himself, though allowed to complete his studies, may have to follow her when he comes of age. His classmates don’t have to wait for such miseries to inform them that they are outsiders, but they keep themselves busy with the ephemeral delights of rap, soccer, gossip, sexual teasing, and bursts of anarchy. They give the subtleties of the French subjunctive short shrift. They know that grammar is a passport into polite society and intellectual circles, but since most of them never enter that society or those circles, why should they learn the subjunctive?
The classroom scenes (the bulk of the movie) are brilliant examples of ultranaturalism. A script existed, but I assume it was an outline to be filled in by the improvisations of the director and his cast. There is relatively little cutting, and the “takes” are lengthy, with the high-def cameras hovering near the faces of teacher and students, pivoting back and forth between questions and answers, insults and retorts: documentary methods applied to fiction. The Class thrives on the seemingly unrehearsed (but actually well-rehearsed) energy of the children, their alert malice, their premature cynicism, their cocky knowingness and, beneath that knowingness, their bewilderment about where they stand in France, a society so serenely sure of its supreme cultural value that it can goad an insecure outsider into actions that will keep him or her on the outside forever. It’s no accident, surely, that the film’s actual title, Entre les murs (Between the Walls), may suggest the walls of a prison, or a holding cell, as well as a school’s.
The great virtue of The Class—its vivid group portrait—entails its own defect, or at least a limitation: you want to know more about individual kids outside the classroom. If the boy from Mali, Souleymane, has to go back home after his expulsion, what awaits him-political reprisal? Poverty? And did Esmeralda, an Arab girl whose attitude seems to be one big nyah-nyah, really read Plato’s Republic in her spare time or is she just trying to impress her teacher? Within this film’s self-imposed boundaries, these questions go unanswered; here, the classroom is the world.
What’s striking about another naturalistic movie, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, is that it breeds no such frustration. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his Chicago Sun-Times review, a viewer can “know so much about Wendy, although this movie tells...so little.” Yes, we receive scant data about this young woman driving to Alaska with her dog, Lucy (perhaps she comes from Indiana; perhaps it’s job prospects that lure her up north), yet the sheer presence of Michelle Williams—a deer eternally poised for flight—makes our factual questions picayune.
Stuck in an Oregon town because of the breakdown of her car and a shoplifting charge whose fine costs her fifty times more than the dog food she tried to steal, Wendy loses her beloved mutt and spends the rest of the movie waiting for a call from the pound, talking with a kind security guard (Wally Dalton, effortlessly sketching in a decency that mitigates the movie’s harshness), negotiating with a mechanic (the dependable Will Patton as an interesting blend of honesty and financial calculation), finding a safe place to sleep, scrounging for food. How boring all this should be, yet none of it is boring. Reichardt is a watchful, noticing director and she coaxes us to be watchful and to notice. When the security guard dismisses his own town as a backwater, the director cuts to what Wendy observes as she listens: an old guy down the street negotiating the curb in his motorized chair. The sight seems to sum up what she’s hearing: “You can’t get an address [here] without an address. You can’t get a job without a job. It’s all fixed.” The guard surely means “fixed” as in “You can’t beat the system.” But another definition also fits: economic and emotional stasis.
As Wendy grows more and more mired in trouble, we watch what she watches with increasing anxiety and suspense. Trying to spot Lucy, she strides past a long row of cages in the pound, the camera representing her point of view with a fast horizontal sweep. But we want it to slow down, for we can’t recognize Lucy as fast as her owner can. Thus, Reichardt forces us to lean forward and squint, to sympathize and work with Wendy on her quest.
Later, startled awake in a park where she’s camped for the night, Wendy finds herself menaced by an addled vagrant who warns her not to look at him. She tries to obey but can’t help peeking up, and the camera alternates between crowding closer to her face and letting us glimpse the lunatic’s night-obscured countenance. It’s not often that an outdoor shot can evoke such claustrophobic terror.
Then again, it’s not often that a movie evokes the terror of falling away from civilization’s safeguards while still dwelling in the midst of mankind.
