Film review

  • Monsieur Lazhar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Philippe Falardeau (2011)

    Monsieur Lazhar gets off to an improbable start.  Simon (Emilien Néron), an eleven-year-old Montreal schoolboy, looks into a classroom to see a woman’s body hanging from the ceiling.  Horrified, he rushes off but the camera stays put.  The rest of the class congregates in the corridor.  Teachers dash in among the children, telling them to go back outside and not to ask any questions:  it seems unlikely the staff would take a panicked kid’s word for what they’d find in the classroom without even bothering to look.  The dead woman is Martine Lachance, Simon’s form teacher.  The school head, Madame Vaillancourt (Danielle Proulx), is immediately worried she won’t be able to find a replacement – ‘No one wants to come to this school anymore’.  Is staff suicide a recurring problem there?  Next, Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Said Fellag – known simply as Fellag) arrives in the head’s office.  He is, he says, following up an advertisement for the position that he saw in the paper.  Bachir explains that he taught for twenty years in a college in his native Algeria but he’s not accredited to teach in Canada.  Mme Vaillancourt explains there are procedures to be gone through – she can’t simply take him on.  That’s exactly what she then appears to do. The fact that her decision is key to the film’s conclusion makes it no less incredible that she’d commit such a professional error but, then, she’s working in a system where none of the supply teachers on her list needs the work or feels they can help out a school suffering the trauma of a staff member’s sudden, unexpected death.  There’s no good reason for Philippe Falardeau’s screenplay, based on a one-character play by Evelyne de la Chenelière, to be so unrealistic.  I could never really believe in the film after this beginning.

    Although Falardeau’s implausible characterisation of the Quebec school system results from his need to get the story of Bachir Lazhar underway and his inability to find a more convincing way of doing it, Monsieur Lazhar does have a persistent bee in its bonnet about one aspect of contemporary education – the veto on teachers having any physical contact with children, whether it’s hitting them or hugging them.  Bachir is reprimanded early on for instinctively smacking Simon’s head.  It turns out the boy’s claims that Martine Lachance hugged him (true) and kissed him (which he eventually admits was untrue) may have led to her suicide (although we’re also told that she was already prone to anxiety attacks).  In the final shot of the film, when the school year has ended and Bachir’s employment as a teacher with it, he hugs another child, Alice (Sophie Nélisse).  (His favourite pupil, she adores him too.)  But the don’t-touch theme isn’t used for the dramatic climax I expected and which, given the theme’s salience in the movie, would have made good sense.  When Simon eventually breaks down in class and admits he embroidered his story of the extent of Martine Lachance’s physical affection, Bachir goes to comfort him.  It’s a strong moment because you think the man can’t possibly put his arm round the boy.  Yet he does more than that – Bachir’s hand even seems to linger on Simon’s shoulder.  The child doesn’t appear to register the significance of the kind embrace.  Nor, more surprisingly, does the spiteful clever clogs Marie-Frédérique (Marie-Eve Beaugregard), who reminded Bachir when he clipped Simon in the earlier scene, ‘We’re not in Saudi Arabia now’.  Nor does the sensitive, watchful Alice.  Falardeau could have shown her responding as if to say, ‘we know this is against the rules but we realise there are times when the rules aren’t good enough’.  But there are no reactions at all.

    And no follow-up either.  I assumed the helping hand to Simon would cost Bachir his job but Philippe Falardeau’s use of his themes is mechanical.  At this point, he has another one he can use to dismiss Bachir so he decides he doesn’t need the physical ‘abuse’ one, in spite of its centrality.  The other two strands of the story concern the protagonist’s personal circumstances and the aftermath of Martine Lachance’s suicide.  Bachir, whose wife and children died in a fire in Algeria shortly before they were due to join him in Canada, is still seeking political asylum there.  Mme Vaillancourt brings in a psychologist (Nicole-Sylvie Lagrande) for Martine’s class.  Both these themes are thin and the working out of them is perfunctory.  We see Bachir talking to his lawyer, then under questioning in an asylum hearing, then back to the judge to learn the good news that he can stay in his adopted country:  it’s been confirmed that the fire that killed his family wasn’t an accident and that Bachir would be in danger were he to be deported to Algeria.  These scenes are complemented by conventional details like Bachir gazing sadly at a photo of his wife and children.  (The other significant photo in the film, one of Martine on which Simon has drawn a rope behind her head and angel’s wings, just happens to be sticking out of the boy’s back pocket – to allow another kid to swipe it and get the momentum of Simon’s exposure going.)  Alice, the only other child to see Martine’s corpse, writes an honest, unhappy essay about the death and its aftermath.  Bachir is much impressed by this and wants the text circulated to all the kids in the school.  Mme Vaillancourt, not unreasonably, says no.  We’re meant to think Bachir is sympathetic to Alice’s struggling to move on from the suicide because he hasn’t got over his own loss.  Although this connects the two themes, the traumatisation of the class doesn’t amount to much more:  Alice and Simon are the only ones affected.  Indeed, only four other kids are characterised at all:  the egregious Marie-Frédérique; a boy who gets migraines and nosebleeds (Vincent Millard); another from an Arab immigrant family (Seddik Benslimane); and Boris, an overweight and dim boy who’s made fun of (Louis-David Leblanc).  Boris’s father is Chilean – it turns out his grandfather was a victim of the Pinochet regime.  Each child has their sliver of significance or chimes neatly with the central character.  In the case of Boris, we’re supposed to take him more seriously because of what happened to his grandfather:  he’s not a stupid fatso after all.  Falardeau is careless: Marie-Frédérique’s parent are knowalls, like their daughter.  In the crucial scene, before he embraces Simon, Bachir makes a sarcastic reference to them.  This too has no follow-up although you know Marie-Frédérique would go straight back to her parents and they’d file a complaint.

    Introducing himself to the class, Bachir explains that his forename means ‘bringer of good news’ and his surname means ‘good luck’ (as, of course, does the surname of his suicidal predecessor).  But Monsieur Lazhar is really just Mr Nice – Fellag plays him with sensitive intelligence but the character isn’t complex enough.  Bachir was educated in Algeria and a civil servant there before he turned his hand to running a restaurant.  (It’s a typical moment when Mme Vaillancourt eventually asks him what he did in Algeria and he tells her about the restaurant – ‘Oh, shit!’ she exclaims – but not the civil service past, which presumably wouldn’t have earned an expletive.)  The most interesting thing about him is his old-fashioned adherence to a French colonial educational tradition.  His interactions with other characters, like the thirtysomething woman teacher who invites Bachir to dinner (Brigitte Poupart), are unremarkable.  So are most of the rest of the cast, although Sophie Nélisse is consistently good and Emilien Néron improves rapidly:  Simon’s breakdown is emotionally the strongest moment in the film.  Monsieur Lazhar is easy enough to watch but that’s the problem.  Given its themes, you feel it shouldn’t be.

    5 May 2012

  • Detective Story

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1951)

    Detective Story is an adaptation of a successful Broadway play of 1949 by Sidney Kingsley.  William Wyler has the confidence to live with the constraints on movement dictated by the stage origins of the piece – there’s remarkably little opening out of the action – and the skill to make a dramatic virtue of the largely unchanging set, a New York police station.  The spirit of place he creates gets across the boredom and the continuously dangerous edge of working there.  The routine is oppressive but fragile, because of what could happen, and the few eruptions of violence – whether yelling voices or physical assaults – have real impact.  Wyler’s previous film, The Heiress, was one of his very best.  Detective Story doesn’t, unlike that film, have great acting in it but Wyler’s orchestration of the cast is superb.  The characterisations are consistently rich and the variety of rhythms in the exchanges between characters is very pleasing.  All the cops are good – Horace McMahon, Frank Faylen, Bert Freed and, especially, William Bendix, whose naturalness and depth transcend the obvious and limited conception of the character of Lou Brody.  His son died in action in World War II; Brody feels sympathetic towards a young man, well played by Craig Hill, who’s charged with theft and who’s the same age as Brody’s son would now have been.

    It takes a little time to get your bearings with Detective Story.  What’s so clever about Wyler’s direction is that seeming shortcomings in the initial stages turn into major strengths of the film.  As a spinster shoplifter, Lee Grant seems a shade too theatrical when she first arrives in the station and there’s not much else happening there yet.  But she’s completely in tune with the (unnamed) woman’s slightly forlorn eccentricity and she stays thoroughly in character.  By the time she leaves the premises after things there have got much more complicated and troubling, you’re very sorry to see Grant go:  it’s a beautiful piece of acting.  Although the story holds your interest from the outset, it lacks a focus – until you realise the connections between the several threads of the plot, and that the number of things going on is essential to the atmosphere and changes in tempo.  The converse effect is what stops Detective Story from being even better than it is.  A focus does gradually develop.  It’s on a morally uncompromising detective, Jim McLeod, who believes that all wrongdoers should be punished and that a criminal suspect is almost certainly a wrongdoer.  McLeod shows a more yielding side in his love for his wife Mary.  The only sadness in their otherwise perfect marriage is her continuing inability to conceive.  It’s necessary, of course, for Jim to be punished for his brutal moralism; and for Mary and a personal history he didn’t know about to generate that punishment, and reveal Jim’s own unhappy past.

    As the couple’s relationship increasingly takes centre stage (and that it is the phrase for it), the script gets wordier and clichéd.  (It’s adapted from the Kingsley play by Philip Yordan and Robert Wyler, the director’s older brother.)  The problem is made worse by Eleanor Parker in the role of the wife.  She’s unusually tolerable in her early scenes (so much so I had to look twice to check it was her) but, once Mary starts suffering, Parker, even under Wyler’s direction, is back to her stiffly histrionic self.  It’s hard to believe that proper Mary ever had sex outside marriage with anyone – and Parker doesn’t remotely suggest that her properness is a front.  I also got confused about Mary’s shameful connection with a New Jersey doctor (George Macready), a man her husband takes a particular dislike to:  it seems that she must have had an abortion yet there are references to her illegitimate child being stillborn[1].  Kirk Douglas in the role of Jim McLeod is, however, a big compensation.  He gives a performance of force and commendable empathy.  An impossible load of bitter (self-)recrimination is required of him by the end but it’s quite something that so much of it seems genuinely felt.  The casting of Douglas is acute in any case.  His natural rapport with the audience makes McLeod’s harsh moral intransigence challenging – you can’t stand back from it the way you could if someone less engaging were in the role (or if Kirk Douglas had himself stood back from the character).  As Charley Gennini, a recidivist thief, Joseph Wiseman (who, like Lee Grant, had played his role on stage) is acting in a very different style but his vocal and gestural exaggeration pushes Charley far enough over the top to take him somewhere beyond, and make him alarming.

    3 May 2012

    [1] All was explained on Wikipedia – as follows:  ‘During production, the film had some trouble with the Production Code Authority. The Production Code did not allow the killing of police officers or references to abortion. Joseph Breen suggested that explicit references to abortion would be altered to “baby farming”. However, when the film was released, film critics still interpreted Dr Schneider as an illicit abortionist. Breen and William Wyler suggested to the MPAA Production Code Committee that the code be amended to allow the killing of police officers if it was absolutely necessary for the plot. They agreed and the code was amended, lifting the previous ban on cop killing’.

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