The Valadon-Utrillo exhibit portrays the two equally, suggesting a life-long and mutual mother-son influence. Utrillo’s empty landscapes of buildings and streets, haunted by a sense of loneliness, hang next to the bold paintings of his mother, with their extra-bright trees outlined in dark strokes.

The two artists, despite sharing an odd sensibility, seem to have only one aesthetic in common: at times, a similar choice in pastels. “Obviously,” Restellini told me. “They shared the same palette.” Yet aside from this vague similarity, the two are dramatically different.

The mother is known for her nudes which really are “nakeds.” They present no airbrushed prettiness, but slumps and curves and wrinkles. She dared to paint what she saw, a scandalous choice for a woman, it seems.

Restellini told me that women artists—even in the early twentieth century—rarely left the subject matters considered respectable for women: sewing, children, family scenes. Indeed, Valadon’s “Adam and Eve” was censured not because the nudes lacked a fig-leaf, but because the artist was a woman. Another scandalous painting was that of a portrait of a woman playing a viola. Even today, the sexism persists: “She paints like a man,” catalogues announce.

As for Utrillo, he was a drunk since age 9, in despair because his sexy adventurous mother often left him alone as she pursued her art and her loves, including some of the most well-known painters at the time and a wealthy businessman who later married her. Utrillo was to be shunted to insane asylums all his life, the mother apparently spurred to get him institutionalized by her businessman husband who could not take his behavior anymore.

His paintings are typically landscapes of edgy stillness: buildings and streets. “The walls of Utrillo have a painful secret,” Jean Fabris, curator and long time-friend of Utrillo’s widow, told me that a critic once told him. “They have the odor of piss.”

For me, Utrillo’s buildings are reassuring structures, like hard-edged teddy bears that a child might erect around himself when the parents have left. The grey-white streets, such as the famed “Rue Norvins” (1909), have a rainy melancholy even when there is no rain. In his “Eglise de Banlieue,” a lonely whitish light emanates from the steeple, from the safely curved road. My favorite is the blue-roofed “Chapel of Roscoff” (1911), crooked on a dull-green isle, with turbulent waves.

In marked contrast to the mother’s paintings, the human face is missing, and the colors muted. In “Rue Muller at Montmare,” the steps go up, with people’s backs turned, the black and red windows impenetrably closed, with a block of deep green to the left. Like all of Utrillo’s work, it is a very calming painting. In “Derriere la Maison” we see leaves falling in a murky pink-grey sky, snow on a long lamp-post, and dark figures with their backs turned. “The backs are always turned,” said Restellini.

The buildings are more alive than the people, some slanting inward or breathing, while the windows are dark and closed. We can’t see in, just as we can’t see into Utrillo. His paintings are constrained, reserved, strong, and dignified.

Which brings up an interesting paradox: in real life, Utrillo had no dignity. He sold his paintings for a bottle of bad wine. He had alcoholic tantrums of paranoia which made him “horrible” with people, the curator told me. Photographs of him show the kind of person one sees early in the morning at a local smoky bar in Paris: wrinkled and red-cheeked, bowed down. The kind of person one winces at.

Yet all this pain and self-destruction becomes noble and dignified in his art—and is today celebrated by a vast public.

As for Suzanne Valadon, she, daughter of a laundress, once reviled for her loose morals, is now celebrated as well. Her bold lines have become unforgettable. For example, her vivid “Vue de Corte” (1913), a stunning city carved in a hill, outlined like a pile of pebbles, each rounded and imposing, with black borders. It is, like all her work, bright and bold, but not cheerful.

Her trees are also unforgettable, twisted as they are with rich green color and dense black outlines. Also unforgettable, her painting “Still Life with Hare, Pheasant and Apples,” where a tied up hare hangs next to a dead pheasant plopped on a white drape—a simulacrum of a dying old man on a bed—along with five rounded reddish apples.

The mother’s most disturbing work is her self-portrait in her middle age, which even the publicist for the exhibit confessed she could not bare to look at. Valadan is crooked before a mirror, her breasts sagging, her eyes pained with disappointment. “Her lover had left her,” explained the curator.

Or perhaps it was some other lifelong frustration. Both mother and son, Valadon the loose woman (“who dared to be free,” said Restellini) and Utrillo her drunken son, were on the fringes of Paris society during their time, a marginality, the exhibit suggests, due to their lower-class position as well as their artistic difference from the elite painters of the period, the “Ecole de Paris.”

No, for the first time, both Valadon and Utrillo are at the center, a stone’s throw from the Seine in the classy Madeleine plaza, at the most chic museum on the Right Bank.

***

Pinacothèque de Paris. 28 place de la Madeleine, 8th arrondissement. Metro Madeleine. Open daily 10:30am–6pm, until 9pm the first Wed. of the month. Closed May 27 and June 24. Tickets: 9€, or 10€50 if purchased online (avoids possible ticket line at the museum). The Valadon–Utrillo exhibit is showing until September 15, 2009. For more, see www.pinacotheque.com.

Karin Badt is a Paris-based American film critic, fiction writer, and film and theater professor at University of Paris VIII. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Tikkun, Cineaste, and Filmmaker. She has a regular blog at The Huffington Post, where this article first appeared. It has been re-edited for publication on France Revisited.

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To make this film Mr. Cantet set up a real class of disparate adolescents in a high school in Paris’s 20th arrondissement. They improvised together for one year in a workshop-like environment with no set dialogue, creating an atmosphere that allowed the students’ own language and impulses to flourish. The first shot: girls and boys tapping their feet, eating pencils, putting their heads in their lap, hitting their neighbors.

Many journalists applauded the originality of the docu-fiction approach. As film critic and film teacher working in French higher education for the past ten years, my own interest in the film was more particular: in how this portrayal of a classroom exposed specifically French ideas of what it means to educate youth and in what ways those ideas clash with my life growing up in the United States.

To my American-educated eye the teacher in the film, lauded as a “Dead Poets Society” champion to these kids, appears to be disturbingly conservative in his ironic, authoritarian approach. Despite his wit and spark his French rigor shines through. In an early scene, a student objects to the fact that no multi-cultural names are used in sentences on the chalkboard: why is everyone always “Bill” or “John” rather than “Rashid”? The teacher quips: “Do you know how difficult it would be to represent all of your cultures?”

Indeed, The Class, despite its intentions to show dynamic pedagogy at work, reveals the opposite: how learning for the French still consists of accumulating facts: basic mathematical and linguistic skills; points of geography and history; the properties of a triangle. A poem is discussed in terms of its meter. At the end of the school year, the teacher asks each student to say what she or he has learned that year. Each comes up with a fact, so badly learned (i.e. “if the square of two sides of a triangle equals the hypotenuse, this means it is a square”) that the film seems to be mocking its pupils. The facts are divorced from any wider perspective, each as individual as a lone petit-four on a tray.

As a sociological document, the film underscores how the French educational system—even today—is based on the idea that one does not educate students (i.e. lead them, as in the etymological root of the word) but form them as in a mold.

I get these “formed” students in my own university classes: silent as sheep, scared, hesitant to offer original ideas, but extraordinarily well-versed in facts, awkwardly polite, and exasperatingly docile citizens of the classroom. It is telling that the climax of Cantet’s film is a disciplinary problem. A boy is kicked out of school and forced to go back to Mali because of an outburst in the classroom.

The film also makes conspicuous a more alarming and yet subtle feature of the French system: there is no pretense in social mobility for those who are not born of the native white French upper class. A black student hesitantly notes that his mother, a non-French speaking African, would like him to go to the prestigious Henri IV high school. The teacher grins.

The scene is intended as a joke.

When I interviewed the director of the film to find out what he thought of elitism in the French educational system he told me candidly, “A professor cannot speak the same way to a mother who does not speak French as he does to a student heading for the grandes écoles [the most prestigious universities on France]. The mission of a professor is, on the one hand, to help students gain knowledge like math and geography and history, and on the other, to help them become adults. Education has the aim of domestication, to help create intelligent, balanced social beings and citizens. The professor has to tame these teenagers.”

It seems a retrograde idea of education to have “domestication” of students as its principle—or to assume that a teacher must speak differently to an African mother than to a French mother. And yet what seems retrograde to me, as an outsider, may be radical for the French. Francois Bégaudeau. The actor who plays the teacher in the film and the real teacher who wrote the book upon which “the workshops” were based, opined that French schooling is far less conservative now than it once was. For him, the French educational system today is much better than it used to be when he was a boy in the 1980s and felt terribly bored. At least in today’s classroom, he says, the teacher can spar and interact with the students, create lively situations, provoke them. When he taught (he has retired since becoming a writer), he did everything he could to make sure students were not bored.

“For me, when I saw students’ eyes shine, I knew I was doing my work.” He personally opted not to teach classics such as Molière as these were references that had nothing to do with his students’ reality. “It’s scandalous that kids today are bored,” he added animatedly. “That 25% of French students polled would prefer to not go to school.”

As for my perspective that his own attitude was authoritarian: “No, the students love the sparring. Most of my interactions with students are these fun conflicts: it’s a game to see who will get the last word.”

Getting the last word is not a game high on my (again American-trained) pedagogical agenda. That underscores the cultural divide.

It’s the same cultural divide that heard echoed in reactions to the film “The Class” by other journalists at the Cannes screening. “What a great film,” a French Belgian journalist said on the way out. “It shows how hard it is to be a teacher today, to discipline these kids.”

And as though he’d just come from a different film, an Anglo-Canadian journalist said to me at the press coffee bar: “A great film. Shows how oppressive the French school system still is. Everyone has to fit in, or they’re out. Look what they did to that boy from Mali!”

The Class does indeed show two important aspects of the French school system: that forming children in the mold is its baseline approach and that critique is not coming from within.

Karin Badt is an American film critic, fiction writer, and film and theater professor. She has a regular blog at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt.

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