Almost a Masterpiece

In “The Class,� which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, we have a film with no big speeches and no pretensions. It is something better: a burst of realism that comes awfully close to a masterpiece.

Based on a 2006 novel by François Bégaudeau, “The Class� focuses on a former high school teacher at one of Paris’s hard luck public schools and confines most of its drama to the classroom where Mr. Marin (played by Bégaudeau himself) teaches ninth-grade literature.

Assisted by the director, Laurent Cantet, and many angels, Bégaudeau has made a propulsive gabby miracle here with a minimum of context.

 The movie catches Marin in the classroom.

Young, lean and with the air of a sympathetic inquisitor, this teacher likes his job (we don’t see him outside of school) and manages to find flickers of amusement in his give and take with the students.

These students, who have names like Nassim, Dall, Cherrif and Wei, come from the city’s outer rings of Arab, African and Asian immigrants.

How hot is the racial cauldron? When one of his colleagues asks Marin if he can work the Enlightenment into his literature class — say a couple of chapters from “Candide� — Marin shakes his head.

No chance, he says. “The Enlightenment is going to be tough for them.�

It’s a terrific line.

A summary of a France that officially bestows the blessings of the Republic on all of its citizens, regardless of race, while doubting in private the possibility of their success.

But Marin is a complicated figure. On the one hand he has the typical liberal belief in personal growth (one of his classroom projects has the students crafting self-portraits). On the other, you have his teacher’s view of human limitation: many of his students aren’t going anywhere.

One student, a young man from Mali named Souleymane, has flashes of eloquence but mostly sits back in the class, sullen and disruptive.

None of the teachers like the boy. Before you can decide whether he is unreachable, Souleymane is expelled from school after a fight. The disgust the audience is meant to feel is only an exaggerated version of what Marin feels himself. The truth is you weren’t exactly rooting for him either, although you’re a little ashamed at having wished the troubled young man away.

That’s a long way of saying that “The Class� is the kind of tough and hard-thinking movie that could never have been made in this country.

Is there a worse genre in American movies than the parent-teacher picture? It seems to come in only two kinds, both of them rancid: inspirational corn and the socially conscious “problem� picture.

Director Cantet cast the student parts with actual students. Their talk is copious, funny and aggressively slangy. Filming with hand-held cameras, Cantet overloads the frame; and before the movie is underway, he’s thronged it with a dozen teenage kids. I’m not complaining, here. “The Class� runs so far in the direction of realism that it could easily be one of those education documentaries in which the lone cameraman sits in the front row.

There is zero in the way of rhetoric. You might not think that a movie about immigrant kids struggling to master the subjunctive is  much of a draw, but there is something vigorous and vital here. There are times when you wish the talk would slow, but Cantet keeps pushing forward.

For all that, one of the finest sequences in the film happens at the end. The bell has rung. School is out for summer. A look passes over Marin’s face. If I’m not mistaken — the look of relief. On her way out, one of the students stops to say goodbye. We know her only as the girl sitting in the third row who does not talk.

Marin asks what’s up.

The girl tells him.

She has learned nothing, nothing at all that year.

What “The Class� has offered us, in short, is a good man worn ragged by work.

“The Class� is rated PG-13 for language.

It is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY.