Free adaptation of François Bégaudeau’s nonfiction chronicle of a single year of teaching French, or trying to teach it, to a group of restive fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds at a melting-pot public school in a rough district of Paris. Bégaudeau essentially — and needless to say, convincingly — plays himself on screen, under the fictitious monicker of M. Marin, and the students are nonprofessionals chosen with no eye to beauty and glamour, but a sensitive eye to a variety of shapes and shades. Laurent Cantet, best known for Time Out and Heading South, has directed the piece with standardized documentary affectations — an air of improvisation, a raw digital image, a bobbing camera and floating frame, no background music — and the teaching sessions are far less compressed than in the typical school film of minute-and-a-half classes and saved-by-the-bell. (Many of the nuances of language and accent are unavoidably lost in the English subtitles.) The circle of action is strictly confined to the school grounds, and any parents who enter into the picture must come to campus to do so. There is no continuous story arc, although the disciplinary proceedings against a chair-rocking troublemaker from Mali become the focus of the final stretch. By then we have gotten to know a few of the students quite well, while others are still getting noticed for the first time. It all feels irrefutably and exasperatingly real; and the teacher, a youthful figure given to Socratic sparring with his charges, wins our admiration for his equanimity under the constant stress. A misunderstood use of the word “skank” (as it is translated) in class discussion can be readily pardoned. For all that, the drawback of the rigorously realistic movie is that it seldom adds up to more than the sum of its parts. This isn’t the exception. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd