‘The Class’ and ‘Two Lovers’ take clear-eyed looks at education and romance
By Elise Nakhnikian
FRENCH writer-director Laurent Cantet is one of the best filmmakers alive. Working in the tradition of Robert Bresson, he shows how forces like class, race and gender can warp lives, and he does it without preaching or pyrotechnics.
His deceptively simple yet engrossing stories contain too many levels of truth to be summed up in one pitch-friendly phrase. They also have an almost documentary sense of reality, partly because Cantet works mainly with nonprofessional actors. Workshopping the script with them for months before shooting, he helps them develop characters who are based on themselves or people they know.
Cantet’s Time Out (2001) is the story of a man too ashamed to tell his family he’s been laid off, who slides into a shadowy secret life parallel to — but increasingly removed from — the comfortable routine his wife and kids still follow. Human Resources (1999) looks at the gulf between blue-collar and white-collar workers through the eyes of a young man, the first in his family to go to college, who takes a summer job in the HR department of the factory where his father has labored for years. Heading South (2006) follows a group of white, middle-class North American women at a Haitian resort, where their relative wealth and the color of their skin makes them the inadvertent oppressors of the local men who serve as their companions — an imbalance we barely bat an eye at when the sexual tourists are men.
Cantet’s latest, The Class, recreates life inside a multicultural Parisian high school to look at what it means to become acculturated and what kids really learn in school. Cantet, whose parents were both schoolteachers, was working on the script when he met François Bégaudeau, a teacher who had written a novel based on his experience at a multiracial Parisian school. The two rewrote the screenplay, merging their stories with the help of frequent Cantet collaborator Robin Campillo.
In the movie, which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, Bégaudeau plays Francois Marin, a version of himself. The other teachers are all played by actual teachers, and the kids are students from Belleville, a district much like the one where Bégaudeau taught. Cantet filmed almost entirely inside the school, mostly staying in Marin’s classroom as he teaches French — or tries to. Three digital cameras were always running, one capturing unscripted things kids did when they didn’t think the camera was on them.
Marin uses a kind of Socratic method of teaching, peppering his student with questions to get them to think about what they’re learning and why. The students respond in kind, forcing Marin to confront some of his own assumptions as his frustration bubbles up, cracking his cool façade. Cultural differences keep getting in the way of communication, and Marin winds up in a toxic standoff with Souleymane (Franck Keita), an alienated Malian immigrant; the rebellious and outspoken Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani); and her quiet but equally strong-willed friend Khoumba (Rachel Regulier). For a while, Marin’s job appears to be in jeopardy, but when one of the kids winds up taking the fall, you wonder if he ever really had a chance.
Cantet says he wanted to make a movie that upends the false pieties of Hollywood films like Dead Poets Society, “where the teacher is always a guru figure, always says exactly the right thing. Our teacher is the opposite of the Robin Williams character — he takes risks, gets it wrong sometimes, asks questions more than he provides answers.”
Mission accomplished.
‘Two Lovers’
James Gray is no Laurent Cantet, but he’s no slouch either. His first film, Little Odessa, won a Silver Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival. His latest and perhaps best feature, Two Lovers, is a clear-eyed, unromantic movie about romance.
Like Cantet, Gray respects all his characters, letting us see everyone’s motivation, so nobody comes off as a bad guy. And yet, in this Midsummer Night’s Dream of a story, one person’s happiness is inevitably another person’s pain.
Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix), who is bipolar, is old enough to live on his own, but he’s back with his parents in a beautifully shot Brighton Beach for a while, still recovering from a recent suicide attempt.
Leonard loves women. He lights up when he flirts, showing flashes of humor and attentiveness that make it plausible — just barely — that the lovely Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) would be drawn to him. But when he’s in shutdown mode, as he usually is, he’s as awkward as Quasimodo, hulking about in the shadows of his own bedroom to spy on his glamorous neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow).
Michelle is a shiksa goddess right out of a Woody Allen movie — in fact, at first she seems to be channeling the Mia Farrow of Crimes and Misdemeanors. Blond and beautiful, frail and screwed up, she assumes center stage from the moment she wanders into Leonard’s life, displacing Sandra, the nice Jewish girl his parents want him to marry. Michelle has no romantic interest in Leonard — she’s got a smarmy married lover at the law firm where she works — but she likes keeping him around as an adoring sidekick.
Phoenix, a Gray regular who starred in We Own the Night and played a key role in The Yards, is painfully vulnerable as Leonard. You cringe when Leonard goes to a fancy restaurant and tries to cover up his unease by ordering a girly drink, then tries to suck it up through a swizzle stick. There’s also something a little too fevered about the happiness that emerges as he starts spending more time with Michelle — and stops taking his meds.
As Leonard’s parents, the naturally elegant Israeli actor Moni Moshonov and the always sympathetic Isabella Rossellini exude waves of quiet empathy. Everyone in this daisy chain — from Leonard’s parents to Leonard to Sandra to Michelle to her lover — seems to mean well, and they all just want to take care of each other. But they just keep getting in one another’s way.
Two Lovers mines that gap, the often unbridgeable distance between what we want for ourselves and what others want from us.
Two Lovers is rated R for language, some sexuality and brief drug use. The Class is rated PG-13 for language.

