When François Bégaudeau, the co-writer and star of Laurent Cantet's The Class, strides confidently into an ethnically mixed middle-school classroom–where he'll spend most of the film's 128 minutes–audiences can be forgiven for expecting him to work miracles. The movies have trained us to believe that an inspirational teacher can turn inner-city thugs into rapping scholars and disaffected private-school kids into barbaric yawpers, so surely a man of Bégaudeau's talents can stir up this melting pot, no? Well, not exactly. The beauty of The Class is that it puts the lie to the one-teacher-can-make-a-difference myth propagated by so many other films; Bégaudeau may well have an impact on his students, but he and the film have the wisdom to understand that some kids can't be reached, and teachers often find that cultural or bureaucratic conditions leave their hands tied.
