‘The Class’ seems real, because a lot of it is

A number of films lately try to skate along the line between fiction and documentary. In “The Class,” the line is almost impossible to spot.

This French feature, which is one of the current foreign-language Oscar nominees and won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is based on a book by a teacher named Francois Begaudeau. His book was a novel, but highly autobiographical.

Director Laurent Cantet decided to cast Begaudeau himself as the teacher in “The Class.” So the film is at risk of becoming a “Dangerous Minds” without Michelle Pfeiffer or “To Sir, With Love” without Sidney Poitier.

But well-worn movie ploys are not the point here. Cantet also cast the students, 14-and-15-year-olds, with non-actors, and allowed the folks in the classroom to improvise their dialogue and behavior (as long as they hit certain developing plot points).

Still, as real as the movie seems, it unfolds in ways that are familiar from the high-school genre. The school is in a multi-ethnic Paris neighborhood, and the class is therefore mixed—and that variety (which sometimes expresses itself in which soccer team a student roots for) is often the subject of class.

A handful of students emerge as the liveliest of the group, including a talkative girl (Esmerelda Ouertani) who just won’t give the teacher a break, and a sullen boy (Franck Keita) whose belligerent reactions precipitate the final stages of the story, as the school needs to decide how to handle his disruptions: expulsion or forgiveness.

There’s no easy way to predict how this is going to go, just as you can’t tell where each class topic is going to develop (the teacher’s nominal subject is French, but each book they read raises larger issues).

We never leave the school itself. Either we’re in the room with the students or with the teacher as he discusses matters with other staff.

Cantet’s films include “Time Out,” a brilliant look at a man’s reaction to losing his job, and “Human Resources,” a ground-level study of workers in a factory. Clearly, human behavior is Cantet’s lesson plan, and, if “The Class” strikes me as just a little less exciting than its reputation, this film still provides a true-to-life learning experience.