The Class: Part documentary, part drama…examines potential and comes close.

I am a fan of both French movies and school yarns featuring unyielding, but inspiring teachers and professors. The Class (Entre les murs in French) offers both and is to be admired for taking on a tricky subject—multicultural education. It also gets a nod for sticking to that subject no matter which way the on-camera students, or the audience for that matter, might wish it to go.

For me the problem is the film offers a tad too much drama for a documentary, but then so rigid in its documentary approach that you feel like a lesson should have been learned in the process. I, for one, came away feeling I was not really sure what the lesson was.

In the Paper Chase, a film about law school that offers no apologies about its dramatic approach, we get the lesson. Professor Kingsfield is a merciless, and at times a one dimensional taskmaster, but the ends eventually justify the means as students emerge from his classroom with little question that they know the law.

The Class features François Begaudeau as a somewhat laid back, French version of the taskmaster. Begaudeau is the former teacher who wrote “Between the Walls.” the autobiographical novel upon which the film is based.

One cannot imagine this film without Begaudeau in front of the class. He is convincing in his desire to reach his students, and unlike Kingsfield he desires to reach them on their own terms.

The students, fellow teachers and administration are equally convincing, and the documentary approach works as it plays all of these forces against one another and they combine to form an ever growing wall that that teacher must climb as the film moves on.

The students evaluate themselves at the end of the Class and the film leaves the most important lesson up to you. You have been given a kind of cliff notes view of multicultural education: all the basic challenges are there, and in the end you are left to draw your own conclusions: Are most of these kids better prepared for the future by the end of the class, and for those who are not, was it their teacher, the administration, or something bigger that leaves them wanting?

Watch trailer here.