If the American education system is waiting for a Superman, then so, too, are American movie audiences clamoring for a film that correctly represents education as it really is.
Our school-centric films are typically besotted with hokey, artless hyperbole, from crusading educators dodging bullets as they turn inner-city gangbangers into Shakespearean scholars to prep-school elitists brazenly expressing rebelliousness by – gasp! – standing on their desks. The inspirational music swells, everybody is changed for the better in the process and, of course, the teacher learns as much from his students as they do from him. Gag me with a spoon.
Monsieur Lazhar is not an American film — it’s set in our neighbor to the north — but its themes translate across borders, language and culture, and, along with Tony Kaye’s recent Detachment, it sends a jolt of authenticity into a genre sorely needing it. Its opening sequence immediately identifies the film as a stray from the school-movie norm. A young adolescent grabs a crate of milk for his classmates — it’s his day to do so — and is about to enter the classroom door for first period when he sees, through the window slit, the image that will haunt himself and the rest of the movie: his teacher, hanging dead from a rope.
The suicide stuns the Montreal middle school, but business as usual begins soon enough, with the walls of the classroom repainted and a psychologist brought on to speak to students. As for the tragic teacher’s replacement, that position falls on the title character, Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag), an Algerian immigrant, claiming to be a teacher, who responds to a newspaper article about the suicide and winds up obtaining the unenviable job.
Lazhar is an outsider in more ways than one. We soon learn that he has fled his Arab homeland following his own devastating tragedy, and he’s litigating for political exile in Canada. In his previous life, he ran a café-restaurant. He has no teaching experience, and much of his acclimation into the Montreal school system is learning on the job: You can’t smack a kid upside the head even if he deserves it, you shouldn’t teach Balzac to 12-year-olds, the parents are always right, and please leave any discussion of the traumatic suicide to the psychologist, thank you very much.
A recent Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Monsieur Lazhar has much to say about modern education, and indeed the world at large — particularly the tendency of well-intentioned but wrongheaded people to sweep “incidents” under the rug, leaving the students, who want to delve deeply into the root of their teacher’s death, emotionally rudderless.
When Lazhar pitches to the principal that one of his students’ eloquent essays about the shameful act should be read aloud to the entire school, the idea is shot down. Ignoring the issue is school policy, not confronting it, and a recurring metaphor about a chrysalis, encased in its protective cocoon, nicely encapsulates the way the students are sheltered from the truth. Monsieur Lazhar is, among other things, an argument for dissention – for breaking the rules, if the rules are this ridiculous and damaging.
It’s also a poignant film about coping, a must-view for anyone who has suffered personal tragedy. Its layered message is delivered with lyrical consonance: Just as the students’ attempts to openly discuss the suicide are thwarted by policy, so, too, does Algeria’s government use a similar justification to pretend that political violence has ceased in the wake of the Algerian Civil War in its attempt to send Lazhar home. He and the students are one and the same, battling the system with gradual, nuanced cracks in its armor.
All of the performers in this humanist tale, especially the kids, are terrific, and it’s hard to believe the film was adapted from a one-man play. But what’s most inspiring about Monsieur Lazhar is that it’s not “inspiring” in that contrived, everything-falls-into-place manner. Lazhar is not a platitude-speaking maverick sent to reform the anarchic status quo, and the kids are not the wretched, nihilistic rapscallions that have lurked cinematic schools since Blackboard Jungle. They’re all just people, suffering life’s injustices and hoping to emerge unscathed.
MONSIEUR LAZHAR. Director: Philippe Falardeau; Cast: Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, Émilien Néron, Marie-Ève Beauregard, Vincent Millard; Distributor: Music Box Films; Rating: PG-13. In French with English subtitles. Now playing at Coral Gables Art Cinema; opens Friday at Living Room Theaters at FAU in Boca Raton, Movies of Delray and Movies of Lake Worth