Review

The New York Film Festival opens with Laurent Cantet’s The Class, in which a Paris high-school teacher, François (played by François Bégaudeau, who wrote a memoir about teaching), labors over the course of a year to engage his mostly poor, multiracial students. The class scenes were largely improvised and seem to unfold in real time—they go on and on. Yet they’re each a cliffhanger. Great teaching is presented as an exhausting series of negotiations, the meaning in the minutiae—sometimes in the smallest of exchanges. For most of the film, François is an inspiring figure; then something, for a variety of reasons, snaps, and he becomes piggish and irrational. He does bad. Yet we never entirely abandon him. The process has been so fraught. The Class is a true movie miracle: fragile yet indelible. (It opens commercially in December.) — David Edelstein