Un monde

Laura Wandel (2021)

It all takes place within the precincts of a school, often but not entirely in the playground – there are scenes in classrooms, sports facilities and the head teacher’s office.  This isn’t the only reason why the French title of this Belgian film, the writer-director Laura Wandel’s debut feature, is more apt (and expressive) than the English one.  For much of her short (seventy-two-minute) drama, Wandel and the DP Frédéric Noirhomme shoot the action from the eye level of the seven-year-old protagonist, Nora (Maya Vanderbeque) – the world as she sees it.  And hears it:  reverberating sounds convey the affect – disorienting, sometimes threatening – of the gym, the swimming pool and the playground.  The last location, in Wandel’s unsentimental view of primary school as a social organism, emerges as a kind of battlefield.

Playground begins on the morning of Nora’s first day at the school.  At the entrance, she’s sobbing with apprehension at the prospect.  Her father (Karim Leklou) tries in vain to reassure Nora that her older brother Abel (Günter Duret), already a pupil at the school, will be looking out for her.  At break times, Abel tells Nora to stick with her new classmates but he isn’t pulling rank on his sister.  Abel seems anxious.  By the end of the day, Nora has seen the first evidence that her brother is being bullied by other boys – evidence that accumulates and drives the story.  Although Wandel shows Nora gradually finding her own place in the school community, she too is soon on the receiving end of a spiteful peer group, even if it’s not ill treatment of the grossly physical kind that Abel suffers.

Un monde implies a self-contained sphere.  The circumscribed setting reinforces that implication but the unity of place is also responsible for a curious weakness of the film:  Wandel doesn’t allow anything to happen beyond the school gates, even off-screen.  Although Abel begs her not to, Nora feels compelled to tell their father about his being bullied but subsequent scenes don’t give any sense that this is then discussed at home.  The father is a single parent; Nora’s classmates ask why he always brings her to school and arrives to collect her – hasn’t he got a job to go to?  When Nora replies that their father cares for her and Abel rather than going out to work, another child says that her parents think people who don’t have jobs are lazy.  Nora reports this to her father but, once she’s done so, the matter is dropped, even by the other school kids – unlikely as that seems according to the law of the playground as Wandel presents it.  You end up thinking the issue has been raised simply to make clear how different the main family’s domestic set-up is from the norm (though it’s surely not so extraordinary in twenty-first-century Belgium).  Wandel also has problems bringing Playground to a close.  The final shot is of Nora and Abel hugging each other, as if having decisively come through.  You’re grateful for the relatively upbeat ending without being convinced by it.

This distressing and compelling film is variously impressive, though.  Wandel sets up the situation in quasi-documentary sequences that nevertheless have dramatic shape.  In keeping with this, she gets natural but incisive performances from her very young cast, and Maya Vanderbeque is simply amazing:  it’s one of the best pieces of acting by a child of this age that I can remember seeing.  The different kinds of bullying and discrimination in evidence give texture to the piece:  one little girl’s giving and taking away of invitations to her upcoming birthday party is shown to be as tyrannical, in its way, as older boys plunging Abel’s head into a toilet bowl.  Both he and Nora learn that attack is a victim’s best means of defence.  Nora rips up the party invitations.  It’s not too long before Abel decides that if you can’t beat them join them, and a different boy becomes the focus of abuse.  The teachers aren’t unkind or indifferent but – with the exception of Mme Agnès (Laura Verlinden), who talks and listens sensitively to Nora – they don’t, or can’t, do much to help.  There’s no music:  Playground is the latest proof that a film doesn’t always need it.

26 April 2022