The Screengrab : the class

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Winners (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

"Down to Earth" from Wall-E – Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman (music), Peter Gabriel (lyrics)
"Jai Ho" from Slumdog Millionaire – A. R. Rahman (music), Gulzar (lyrics)
"O Saya" from Slumdog Millionaire – A. R. Rahman and M.I.A.

Paul Clark Predicts: "Jai Ho"

Some might be predicting vote-splitting among the two Slumdog nominees, but I’d say the dance number clinches it for the song, giving it a level of goodwill with audiences it doesn’t necessarily deserve.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: "Down to Earth"

What the hell is going on with this category? What do they actually base this nomination on? Why does the Academy consider the unmemorable “Down To Earth” better than that unmemorable Bruce Springsteen song from The Wrestler? MSNBC.com has some theories...but as for my prediction, I’m assuming the two Slumdog songs cancel each other out, leaving Wall-E with the prize.

Nick Schager Predicts: "Jai Ho"

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: "Down to Earth"

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NO CONSENSUS!

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

And the nominees are...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Alexandre Desplat
Defiance – James Newton Howard
Milk – Danny Elfman
Slumdog Millionaire – A.R. Rahman
Wall-E – Thomas Newman

Paul Clark Predicts: Thomas Newman

Newman’s been nominated ten times so far without winning (take that, Kate Winslet!), and his Wall-E score is one of his finest yet. Of its strongest competitors, Slumdog will have to settle for a win for Best Song, and Button’s Alexandre Desplat will have plenty of other chances to win.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Alexandre Desplat

There are categories people have strong opinions about. This is not one of those categories. As such, I’m just marking down Benjamin Button, in the same way I suspect many Academy voters (or their assistants) will. Plus, the funny name rule applies again, because the nominated composer is Alexandre Desplat and I just like saying “Desplat.”

Nick Schager and Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predict: A.R. Rahman

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Danny Elfman

I don't know why The Dark Knight isn't nominated in this category. That's a tremendously exciting score. I could clean my apartment in about twelve minutes with that music playing.

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: A.R. RAHMAN, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

And the nominees are...

Revanche (Austria) in German - Götz Spielmann
The Class (France) in French - Laurent Cantet
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Germany) in German
Departures (Japan) in Japanese
Waltz with Bashir (Israel) in Hebrew - Ari Folman

Paul Clark Predicts: Waltz With Bashir

With no dramedies about cranky geriatrics or Holocaust epics in the mix, the voters will have to get creative. This is the highest-profile of the bunch, and the one that seems most like the health food they generally go for in this category.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: The Class

I’m not up on my foreign films this year, though I’ve heard a lot of swoony buzz on The Class. But riddle me this: if Waltz With Bashir is good enough for a nomination here, out of all the world’s films, how come it wasn’t good enough to compete with Bolt and Kung Fu Panda in the Animated Feature category?

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Waltz With Bashir

The Baader Meinhof Complex is far too controversial to take an Oscar back to Germany. It’s likely to come down to a battle between The Class, which has crowd-pleasing, voter-appealing qualities, and the overrated Waltz with Bashir, which is gimmicky and thin but has a sort of immediacy that voters are prone to like. I’m guessing the voters will make the wrong choice in this case.

Should Win: The Class
Will Win: Waltz with Bashir

Nick Shager Predicts: Waltz With Bashir

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Waltz With Bashir

Because it's done for documentary film what Maus and Persepolis the book did for memoirs. Also it could hardly have come at a better (or worse, depending on how you look at it) time in terms of current events in Israel.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Waltz With Bashir

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: WALTZ WITH BASHIR

Stay tuned for a bunch of editors, make-up artists and writers nobody cares about while all the cool kids go out for a cigarette break as the Screengrab 2009 Oscar Special continues!

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

The Best of 2008: Leonard Pierce's Picks for the Best Movies of the Year, Part Two

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:45:00 GMT

5. WALL*E (Andrew Stanton, dir.)

Pixar has been on such a roll of late that if they were a single director, they’d be getting mention in the same breath as the golden age greats. But they’re not; they’re an aggregate of many clever, talented folks who make computer-generated cartoons that are at least partly intended for children. I’m not going to argue that this isn’t sometimes a weakness; in WALL*E, the environmental message only seems fitting and appropriate because I happen to agree with it, and the crypto-Objectivism in The Incredibles only bothered me because I don’t. But regardless of the heavy-handedness of the moral, it can’t be denied that WALL*E is flat out the most wonderful film of the year, hopeful and funny and romantic and bittersweet all at the same time, and wrapped up in a package so beautiful to look at you wonder why anyone ever questions the potential of CGI. And if this astounding motion picture spawned an obnoxious marketing empire, one can only shake one’s head and say “Damn kids don’t know how good they’ve got it.”

4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, dir.)

If you ever want to flummox a music critic, ask him to describe one of his favorite new bands without comparing them to another band. Of course, Rachel Getting Married proves that the same can occasionally be said for movie critics: it seems impossible to talk about without referencing something else. It’s got the dysfunctional family dynamics of Il y a Longtemps Que Je T’aime; the comeback-kid story of The Wrestler; the hateful-misanthrope-as-vehicle-for-joyous-redemption jawn of a Wes Anderson film (only better) and the structure and form of the late Robert Altman’s best work (only different). With all of these elements at play, though, it never seems derivative of anything else, only reminiscent in the best possible way. In the end, Rachel Getting Married is its own film, familiar yet new and impressive, and carried along by some of the finest acting of the year, most especially from Anne Hathaway and Bill Irwin.

3. CHE (Steven Soderbergh, dir.)

Steven Soderbergh keeps on making great movies, and never the same one twice. His latest is getting lots of what child care experts call “good attention” and “bad attention”; it’s certain that Soderbergh intended it that way, with its rigid formal structure, back-spasm-inducing length, difficult tonal shifts, and…oh, yeah, it’s a biopic about one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century. It’s just as hard to figure out how much of the negative reception is due to political and moral judgment of the revolutionary Che Guevara as it is to figure out how much of the positive reception comes from those who valorize him, but taken purely as a movie, Che is hard to beat: it’s formally daring, adventurously directed, risk-taking, well-made, and held together by a powerful performance that shows its subject neither as a heroic rebel or a vicious murderer, but simply as a man so consumed by his cause that he didn’t know what else to do than keep fighting for it.

2. WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, dir.)

There have been a number of exceptionally well-done documentaries in recent years about ordinary people dangling from the precipice of financial ruin in economically uncertain times, but successful narrative films dealing with the same subject have been few and far between. That’s largely because it’s hard to approach the topic in fiction without becoming didactic, maudlin, or treacly – and those challenges are certainly, and perilously, evident in Kelly Reichardt’s story about a young woman in brutally limited circumstances who loses her beloved dog while pursuing a slender chance at a decent job. But the miraculous thing about Wendy and Lucy is that it toes that line from its first frame to its last without ever tumbling down and making a mess of itself. That’s a testament to the top-notch script, the surprisingly deep direction, and the beautiful performance by lead actress Michelle Williams. No one could ever have predicted that an heir to the Italian neo-realist tradition would emerge in 2008 from America’s Pacific Northwest; that it happened is one of the year’s greatest surprises.

1. SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, dir.)

There are so many things that could have gone wrong with Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. I first heard him talk about his desire to direct way back in 2004, when I interviewed him for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and when Synechdoche, New York was finally announced, I was full of dread. The video stores of America are choked with mediocre-to-bad movies by talented writers who decided what they really wanted to do was direct. I needn’t have worried: Synechdoche, New York is easily my favorite film of the year. Kaufman approached directing with the same meticulous, self-searching approach that he does writing, and the result is nothing short of astounding. The best movies, for me, are the ones that seem to completely rewire my head – that are so profound and well-crafted that they redefine my basic approach to their subject, form or content. Charlie Kaufman accomplishes that his first time out of the gate, and that’s the mark of a major talent.

ALMOST MADE IT: The Strangers, Doubt, Iron Man, The Wrestler, Bigger Stronger Faster*.

DIDN'T SEE THEM: Entre les Murs (The Class), Standard Operating Procedure, Lat den Ratte Komme In (Let the Right One In), Dear Zachary: A Letter To His Son About His Father, Trouble the Water, Full Battle Rattle, Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon).

PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler; Bill Irwin, Rachel Getting Married; Kristin Scott Thomas, Il y a Longtemps Que Je T'aime; Viola Davis, Doubt.

MADE IN 2007, BUT GREAT IN 2008: 4 Luni 3 Saptamani si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days); Paranoid Park; My Winnipeg; Une Vielle Maitress (The Last Mistress); Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven); Encounters at the End of the World; Chop Shop.

OVERRATED: Waltz with Bashir; In Bruges; Happy-Go-Lucky; Slumdog Millionaire; Kung Fu Panda.

Click for Part One

2008 in Review: Phil Nugent's Top Ten

Phil Nugent — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

BEFORE I FORGET: Writer-director-star's Jacques Nolot's measured, surprisingly affecting portrait of an aging gay hustler whose friends are dying off (as he himself enters his twenty-fourth year of being HIV-positive) and who lives in fear of losing the very memories that he's become mired in. A dry-eyed yet very moving experience, this French film arrived in theaters here in late summer and attracted about as much attention as most films do when they're not in English and include plenty of footage of men in their fifties and sixties with their clothes off.

CHOP SHOP Writer-director Rahmin Bahrani, who also made Man Push Cart and the forthcoming Goodbye Solo, makes movies about people different from those at the center of mainstream movie culture, hard-edged but sympathetic explorations of what it means to be economically shut out and culturally isolated. This is real Neo-Realism for our times, and it makes something like Wendy and Lucy look like the overpraised, pity-the-poor-waif hankie movie it is.

A CHRISTMAS TALE: Arnaud Desplechin's two-and-a-half-hour, bracingly grown-up domestic drama has all the things that make the holidays great: inherited terminal illness, drunken name-calling, childhood fantasies that would make Dr. Phil alert the FBI, adulterous yearnings, repressed family resentments, family resentments that couldn't be less repressed if they were spelled out on the side of the Goodyear blimp, and bitterly estranged siblings battling over which of them will get the bragging rights for the crucial donation to mom's bone marrow transplant. All that plus this classic Christmas Eve conversation between a drunken adult and a couple of kids: "Boys, you should go to bed." "We're waiting for Jesus." "But Jesus never existed." "We'll wait anyway. We want to see him"

THE CLASS: Laurent Cantet's improvisational take on the education system. See the Screengrab Q & A.

THE DARK KNIGHT: Because Heath Ledger's Joker convinced me that if I didn't include this one, he'd come back to talk to me about it. This one is also for the woman who was sitting behind me at the Empire 25 in Times Square, who, when Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon let his wife know that he hadn't really been killed by showing up on the doorstep in the middle of the night and the wife slapped him--Ka-POW!!-- across his sheepish face, said, "I know that's right!" and who, when the wife then grabbed him and kissed him while his cheek was still throbbing, whispered, "That's right, too."

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: Fatih Akin's Head-On was one of my favorite movies of the decade. A pure charge of sadomasochistic romantic torment, it was by turns funny, angry, sexy, and heart-breaking, and it just seemed to flow as naturally as a spring brook. His newest multi-character drama isn't as ferociously inspired as that picture was; the plot is built on a string of coincidences, and Akin lets you hear the gears turning. But it's still one of the most remarkable dramas of the year, from a filmmaker who remains a man to watch.

THE ORDER OF MYTHS: Margaret Brown's jaw-dropping documentary about the parallel, racially segregated Mardi Gras cultures of Mobile, Alabama. Would make for the double feature of the year if paired with another remarkable documentary about race and Southern culture, Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway.

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN: This entry is partly a mea culpa. I first saw Abdellatif Kechiche's Franco-Tunisian family drama, a sprawling film with a basically simple story about an aged immigrant trying to start up a restaurant, when it played last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, and at the time, I wrote a review that emphasized my problems with it, especially my feeling that it sometimes left its performers stranded in needlessly meandering long takes that did not justify its running time of two and a half hours. I'm not quite ready to take all that back, but I have to admit that, in the six months since, parts of this movie have come back and played themselves over and over in my head when I was least expecting to think about them again, and that I can't say that about many other films I saw this year. It's just now opened commercially in select U.S. theaters, and damned if I don't feel like I ought to see it again now that I'm no longer suffering from festival fever. In the meantime, I sure wouldn't try to talk anyone else out of seeing it.

SYNECDOCHE, NY: The flaws of Charlie Kaufman's long, cluttered film don't look like much to me in comparison to its achievement: a comedy about all the ways that our obsessions with death and futility prevent us from getting anything done with the precious time we have here, which does full justice to this very depressing theme yet also manages to be very funny. People who fault Kaufman for excessive cleverness might as well be complaining that action movies promote antisocial behavior. Kaufman is clever; more than that, he's actually intelligent. And he's one of the few artists in movies actively grappling with what might just be one of the great concerns of the post-modern world: how do people smart enough to see all the reasons for believing that everything is hopeless stop using their intellligence to trip them themselves up?

WALL-E: The first quarter-hour or so of this Pixar haymaker constitute the most astonishing kind of triumph: a fully realized, scarily believable vision of Hell on Earth that I felt like I never wanted to leave, or at least never stop watching. If, once the plot kicks in, it settles down into a mere first-rate satirical animated love story with a kick, I'd hate for that to seem like a complaint.

HONORABLE MENTION: Dear Zachary: A Letter to His Son about His Father, Encounters at the End of the World, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Full Battle Rattle, The Go-Getter, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Iron Man, Jellyfish, Kung Fu Panda, Let the Right One In, Man on Wire, Milk, My Winnipeg, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Paranoid Park, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Slumdog Millionaire, Summer Palace, Taxi to the Dark Side, Trouble the Water, The Unforseen, Up the Yangtze, The Visitor, Water Lilies, Waltz with Bashir, The Witnesses, The Wrestler

BEST MOVIE RELEASED IN THE U.S. IN 2008 WHICH, FOR SOME REASON, EVERY CRITIC IN THE U.S. PUT ON HIS OR HER TEN-BEST LIST FOR 2007: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

BEST RESTORATION/BEST RE-ISSUE: The Exiles, Kent MacKenzie's legendary 1961 documentary-style look at the Native American subculture of Los Angeles's Bunker Hill. Not as great as the first two Godfather films, which also got a handsome and timely restoration, but that was going to happen anyway. This was more of a happy surprise.

BEST FILMED THEATER: the "avant-garde" production of Hamlet in Jellyfish; the kids' play in A Christmas Tale

BEST SCENE OF A COUPLE OF GUYS BURIED IN PROSTHETIC MAKE-UP GETTING BOOZED UP AND SINGING ALONG WITH BARRY MANILOW: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

REALLY GOOD TV: The HBO film Longford, Generation Kill, Breaking Bad, the last season of The Wire, the last episode of The Shield, Sarah Palin on the interview circuit, and The Drinky Crow Show on Adult Swim

GREAT PERFORMANCES: Jeffrey Wright, Columbus Short, and Eamonn Walker in Cadillac Records, Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussilllon, and Chiara Mastroianni in A Christmas Tale, Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch in Milk, Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, Danny McBride in The Foot Fist Way and Tropic Thunder, Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan in Slumdog Millionaire, Juliette Binoche in The Flight of the Red Balloon, Viola Davis in Doubt, Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler, Melissa Leo in Frozen River, Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsen in Happy-Go-Lucky, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz in Vicki Christina Barcelona, Samantha Morton in Synecdoche, NY, Patricia Clarkson in Elegy and Married Life, Michelle Williams in Synecdoche, NY and Wendy and Lucy, Habib Boufares and Hafsia Herzi in The Secret of the Grain, James Franco in Pineapple Express, Richard Dreyfuss in W., Kristen Scott-Thomas in I've Loved You So Long, Kathryn Hahn in Step Brothers, Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, Tea Leone in Ghost Town, Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jane Lynch in Role Models, Richard Jenkins, Danai Jekesai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass in The Visitor, Ludivine Sagnier in Love Songs and A Girl Cut in Two, Andrew Garfield in Boy A, Famke Janssen in Turn the River, Greta Gerwig in Baghead, Jeanne Balibar in The Duchess of Langeais

BEST USE OF ZOOEY DESCHANEL: The unofficial muse of the Screengrab got the royal treatment in The Go-Getter, a too-little-seen road comedy that marked the writer-director feature debut of Martin Hynes, previously best known as the star of the 1999 short George Lucas in Love. The movie, which also features terrific work by Jena Malone, Maura Tierney, Bill Duke, Judy Greer, Nick Offerman, and its young star, Lou Taylor Pucci, doesn't introduce Deschanel's character unscreen until midway through, though she keeps in touch via cell phone, so the audience gets to have its collective ear tickled by the entrancing sound her voice before being premitted to gaze upon her ethereal loveliness. Slow to turn up in theaters and too quick to vacate them, The Go-Getter was actually completed in 2007, the same year that Deschanel appeared on the small screen in a guest appearance on the increasingly rotten Weeds that came to exactly nothing and as Dorothy as the stinko Wizard of Oz-as-sci-fi-fantasy miniseries Tin Man. This year, she graduated to big-studio movies that sought to exploit her freshness and talent in the name of shoring of has-been directors (in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening) and tired stars (in The Yes Man with Jim Carrey). No wonder the poor kid's looking to break into music.

SHE'S JUST A GIRL WHO CAN'T SAY NO: In Boarding Gate, Asia Argento ran drugs, escaped a hail of gunfire on a motorcycle, got drugged and raped (off-screen) by a bunch of Japanese businessmen, choked Michael Madsen with his own belt only to discover that he kind of enjoyed it, handcuffed Madsen and shot him in the head, and traveled to Hong Kong to find herself at the mercy of Kim Gordon, all nice work if you can get it. She also slipped into black underwear and matching fuck-me shoes to pose for the poster, holding a big-ass gun that she was going to have trouble concealing in that outfit. In The Last Mistress, she told dirty stories about herself and made eating ice cream look as if ought to count as a violation of the Patriot Act. In Mother of Tears, she swam through an underground sea of sewage and gore, got paralyzed, became psychic, witnessed the murders of her friends by ghouls who throttled women with their own intestines and shoved phallic pikes between their legs until the pointy ends came out their mouths, splattered a woman's head like a cantaloupe during a train ride, and hung out with Udo Kier. That last was one was directed by her father. I can't for the life of me decide what that makes it all better or even worse.

BEST INSIDE SNAPSHOT OF HOLLYWOOD: Nina Davenport's documentary Project Filmmaker began with the actor Liev Schreiber, who was planning to make his first film as a director, Everything Is Illluminated (2005), based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel. Schreiber was watching MTV when he saw a report about the effects of the Iraq War and saw a 25-year-old Iraqi, Muthana Mohmed, explaining that he wanted to be a filmmaker but the Americans just blew up the country's film school. In a fit of liberal guilt, Schrieber magnanimously sent word that this lad was to be found and hired and brought to the Czech Republic to work on the set of his major studio production. And Schreiber was so impressed with his own gesture that he further instructed that a documentary would be made to record this inspiring episode in annals of the brotherhood of man. The next thing anyone knew, there was a sullen, pissed-off young Iraqi on the set, telling Davenport's camera how freaked out he was to be "working for a Jewish director of a Jewish movie defending the Jewish theory"--that would appear to be the "theory" that the Holocaust happened--and bitterly complaining that while the most important scenes were being filmed, he was made to remain in a trailer, "mixing the snacks." Davenport seems a little overly taken with the notion that Muthana's story parallels that of Iraq itself since 2003, and way too taken with the idea that there's some larger comment to mae about the culture at large that metasized in Baghdad: at one point, she cuts from actual footage of carnage in Iraq to gruseomely made-up extras lying in heaps on the set of Doom, a movie based on a video game, whose star, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, arranged to sent Muthana to film school in London after the little fella's love affair with Liev Schreiber went the way of all flesh. By the end, Davenport herself is trying to explain to Mohmed that she can't continue to shell out money whenever he says he needs it and complaining that he's gotten his hands on her footage and is "holding it hostage." Early on, Liev Schreiber's associates say that Mohmed simply didn't understand the mechanics of how a smart operator makes himself "indispensible" to a director and so uses his time on a film set as a career stepping stone. But they can't say he didn't learn as he went along.

MOST EFFECTIVE MINDLESS SCARE MACHINE: The Strangers

SHITTIEST-LOOKING MOVIE OF THE YEAR: It used to be that back when filmmaking on almost any scale was an incredibly expensive, physically demanding enterprise, low-budget indie filmmakers and proud amateurs who either couldn't afford or achieve decent lighting or camerawork could be counted on to point to the butt-ugliness of their work as proof of their artistic integrity. But recent technological advances have made films that can't meet a certain level of visual polish harder and harder to come by. JCVD is worth pointing to as a real match of form and content, yoking its single, solitary, half-bright idea--let's get all meta with Jean-Claude Van Damme!--not just to a slack and unimaginative execution but to a visual style that makes it look as if Dario Argento had rubbed entrails all over the camera lens, or that the entire country of Belgium had neglected to pay its light bill. Here's to director Mabrouk el Mechri for kickin' it old school.

NOT ALL THAT: Baghead, Ballast, Be Kind Rewind, Che, Doubt, Frozen River, George Romero's Diary of the Dead, A Girl Cut in Two, Heartbeat Detector, I Serve the King of England, Momma's Man, The Pool, Rachel Getting Married, Shotgun Stories, Standard Operating Procedure, Stuck, Tell No One, Trannsiberian, W., Wendy and Lucy

Screengrab Interview: Laurent Cantet Takes Us to School

Phil Nugent — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Laurent Cantet is one of the most daring and stimulating filmmakers to come out of Europe in the past decade, and he keeps challenging himself. Cantet's movies (Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South), contemporary social dramas that he casts with a mix of trained actors and nonprofessionals, explore issues and anxieties--about work, class, gender, aging--that most films shy away from, and they do it without seeming dry or messagey. His newest film, which will be released in America this weekend under the English language title The Class, is his most ambitious project to date. Based on the book Entre les murs ("Between the Walls") by François Bégaudeau, a 37-year-old former teacher turned novelist and essayist (and film critic), it's a high school movie like no other. Working from a script credited to himself, Bégaudeau, and his own regular screenwriting collaborator, Robin Campillo, Cantet gathered together a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to represent the multicultural classroom presided over by their teacher, played by Bégaudeau. He made some real finds, including the mouthy sparkplug Esméralda Ouertani and Franck Keita, who plays Souleymane, the angriest and most defiantly unreachable of the kids. Once everything was in place, they worked together for a year, with their scenes monitored by three high-definition cameras. (One cameraman focused on the teacher, the second on the kids, and the third was hired to keep an eye out for the happy accidents.) The result is a movie that's bristlingly alive and full of surprises--not the least of which are provided by Bégaudeau's instructor, a hotshot charmer who badly wants the kids to see him as a cool older dude rather than a stuffy instructional figure, and who isn't always able to maintain perspective when faced with a choice between meeting a troubled, needy kid halfway and preserving his own self-image and ego. The Class, which won the Palme d'or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, is arriving in theaters just in time to confirm its status as one of the best pictures of the year.

SCREENGRAB: So, directing your leading man in this movie, you got to tell a film critic what to do. That must have been fun.

LAURENT CANTET: When he was in front of the camera, he was not a critic anymore. He was very busy, not just because he was acting himself, but also guiding the scene from within the scene, guiding the children to go where we wanted them to go. He had to think of all that while we were filming.

SCREENGRAB: I think this is the first movie you've made that started with someone else's material. How did you get involved with Bégaudeau and his book?

CANTET: I wrote the first script two years before reading the book. It was the story of Souleymane. The book is more documentary than the film itself. The book is sort of a diary. Every day he wrote about what he was doing while he was teaching, and then he rewrote that to make it into a chronicle of the life of the class. There was no real dramatic structure in the book. That's why I was able to bring the story about Souleymane that I had written and connect it to the documentary material that Francois had proposed. Then I began to put the script together with Robin Capillo, and Francois would read it every day and tell us, "I can believe this" or "I don't believe that" or "I wouldn't say this in that way, here's how I would say it." He was really more of an advisor than a co-writer.

SCREENGRAB: One thing that I find exciting about your movies is that you seem to be really interested in exploring the ways that institutions let people down.

CANTET: I wanted to show all the complexities of this institution, the school. On the one side, it helps a lot of children to integrate into society. On the other hand, it excludes a lot of children, children like Souleymane, who can't find his place in the system. Or girls like Henriette, the one who says at the end that she feels she hasn't learned anything.

SCREENGRAB: I was a little surprised at the degree to which the teacher is presented as this flawed character. In some ways, his character really doesn't come off very well. Is that something that Bégaudeau was totally on board with?

CANTET: I didn't--we didn't--want to make an ideal teacher, a heroic teacher. Human beings just aren't like that. And of course, it was no problem for Francois to show that side. Because he was acting, you see. It was the same with the children. The boy who plays Souleymane is nothing like Souleymane, he's very kind. But he was able to show this image that's unlike himself.

SCREENGRAB: So the kids were able to step up as actors? Because I was curious about how much you had to shape the roles to fit who the kids already were.

CANTET: There was a kind of alchemy involved. We worked together for a year, you know, in our workshop that we built inside the school, and at times I couldn't tell what was coming from me, from Francois, from the children themselves. We worked together for three hours each week from October till May, and then we shot during the summer, for seven weeks. I wasn't paid [for the preparation period], nobody was paid. It's just my way of working.

SCREENGRAB: How did you find these kids?

CANTET: It was quite easy. We just found the school that was interested in the project, which happened to be in a very mixed neighborhood, and we organized this weekend, and told the volunteers that they would all be welcome, and we had fifty volunteers at the beginning, twenty-five of whom stayed to the end. I didn't choose them. They simply decided to be part of the film.

SCREENGRAB: Some of the kids who really stick out, like Esmeralda--did you know early on that you were going to be using them a lot?

CANTET: Yes, Esmeralda was at the first meeting, and after two minutes -- [laughs and shakes his head]--it was obvious that she was going to be playing a central role. And we were expecting to find such a character, we had a place for her in the conception. And some kids created their own character. Take, for instance, Wei Huang, the young Chinese boy. In the script, we had a young Chinese boy who doesn't speak French very well, and he's afraid of making mistakes, so he just doesn't speak. That might have made for an interesting character. Except then we met Wei, and Wei is very talkative. He likes to express himself, even though his French isn't perfect, he only arrived in the country two years ago. We weren't going to tell him, "Wei, shut up, be more like the character we've written," because Wei was more interesting than that character. So we rewrote the character to better fit Wei.

There's also a character who's a Goth. The boy himself is not a Goth in real life. But when we talked about costuming, someone asked, "Are we obliged to dress exactly as we do in real life?" I said no, if someone wants to be, say, a Goth... I didn't even get to finish my sentence. He was like, "Yes! Yes, I want to be a Goth!" So I said, let's try it. It gave him a chance to be, during the shooting, what he doesn't dare to be in real life. But he really embodied that character, he really lived with that character. He was able to improvise as that character.

SCREENGRAB: You like working with non-actors.

CANTET: Yes, it's something that is, first, very interesting, because you learn a lot of things, and the film becomes based on what they can bring from their own experience. I really like working with that, and I'm always surprised by what can happen. Accidents can happen, you really have to listen to what's happening and use it to rebuild the scene. It's something that I really like.

SCREENGRAB: How different is it working with non-professionals, compared to working with someone like Aurélien Recoing, whose performance in Time Out, which is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, must have taken an awful lot of skill to bring off?

CANTET: In fact, with Aurélien Recoing, we worked a little bit the same way. Aurélien rehearsed with the non-professional actors in the cast, learning to work with them, to help them be at ease in the scene. I like to mix professional and non-professional actors in a scene because I think it helps both. The non-actors may be driven a bit by the professionals, who can give them the confidence they need to get through it. And the professionals don't act the same way as they do when they're working with another actor. They have to really listen.

SCREENGRAB: Have you gotten any feedback from the educational community about The Class?

CANTET: [Pause.] Yes.

SCREENGRAB: {Laughter] Oh-kay.

CANTET: In fact, the film divided the teachers in France, between those who liked it, because they could recognize the problems and issues that they have to deal with every day. And then there are others--and I should say, I think they're in the minority-- who rejected the film because they watched it as if it were a documentary film, and they were judging the teacher, and they didn't want to see a feature film like that. They didn't want to recognize themselves in that. But of course, the teacher is what I wanted him to be, and we never set out to make a film that would present this model to the world where we were going, "Oh, that's a good teacher," or pointing a finger and going, "That's a bad teacher!" We just wanted to show, that's a teacher.