The French Film Ça commence aujourd'hui (1999) was shown in the U.S. with the title It All Starts Today. Bertrand Tavernier was the co-writer and director.
The movie takes place in a small French city that has been devastated by the closure of the mines and the mills that provided employment. Now, the pattern of people without hope asserts itself--violence, crime, vandalism, and child abuse.
As would be expected, the schools are understaffed and underfunded. The mayor even cuts off school lunches for children who are too poor to pay. It's truly grim.
However, there are superheroes at work--the teachers who come to school and do their best every day despite so many obstacles in their path. Philippe Torreton brilliantly portrays Daniel Lefebvre, who is a classroom teacher and also the school principal.
Against all odds, he keeps the school running and maintains morale. The children adore him, and so do the other teachers. We don't normally call educators superheroes, but many of them are. Lefebvre is one of them.
My thought is that you could transfer this film to any U.S. economically depressed city or neighborhood, and it would work just as well. We know what the problems are. Now we have to try to help the teachers do their job.
The movie worked well on the small screen. It has a solid IMDb rating of 7.4, but I thought that it was much better than that, and rated it 10.
Plot summary
Daniel is schoolmaster of a kindergarten in a small French town. The local economy, which depended entirely on coal production, has been mired in a depression ever since the mines were closed. When their parents fall into utter discouragement or even poverty because of prolonged unemployment, the children suffer the consequences. Daniel is confronted daily with difficult situations and he feels responsible to deal with them although they are outside the scope of his responsibilities. This is a frustrating task: politicians are concerned with tightening their budgets, bureaucrats in the intricate web of French social and educational services with their prerogatives, utility companies with getting their bills paid; teachers, social workers, and policemen are overwhelmed. Daniel's relations with his parents, but also with Valeria, his fiancée, and her son are not entirely smooth either. He nevertheless soldiers on with the staff of the kindergarten, all doing their best to educate the children of a severely disrupted society.
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Movie Reviews
Not every superhero wears a cape
A real life's documentary
In a region devastated by the closing of coal mines, and where one worker out of three is unemployed, Bertrand Tavernier tells us the problems of a nursery school's director who wants to improve the social conditions of those people.
He is the only hope for depressive parents but bureaucrats want him to look only after the easy cases forgetting about the problem children.
The challenge of throwing more than thirty 3 to 6 years old kids in the scramble as been taken up: their natural is convincing... and it goes for the director too.
I took part wholeheartedly with the pains and joys of the characters and lived it as if it was real life.
Swift-moving scenes, natural and chaotic
Don't settle down for a comfortable couple of hours easy entertainment. This film carries a message and it will thrash you with it. This is not a film with a stylised story set out in the classical beginning-middle-ending formula; it is a film which swings from scene to scene, at times hectically, with splendid unrehearsed sequences shot with continual changes and panning at frequently too high speed, swinging from schoolmaster to clusters of young faces, zooming in on one, lifting up to worried mothers bursting in, and back down to the schoolmaster, at trepidating speed, breathlessly, at whatever price, because the important thing was to get it all as it happened, how it happened; no way of organising thirty little kids to do the scene again: it would be just too artificial and useless.
The price is some lack of focussing, but it is worth the end result: Alain Choquart under Tavernier's orders achieves something monumental, something magical as his agility with the camera swoops around the school capturing every taut smile, every nervous finger-twisting, the first tears from a hysterical mother... Bertrand Tavernier comes out of that French school of film-making to which he adhered for most of his earlier output and from which he tried to break away with risky excursions into adventure cinema in 'La Fille DE D'Artagnan' (which must have worried Alexandre Dumas) and 'Capitaine Conan' (which must have worried quite a lot of people),as if in a desperate attempt to reach Hollywood-tradition epic proportions.
With 'Ça commence aujourd'hui' everything comes back to earth with a rather nasty bump: Tavernier gets down to the gritty bits of sordid suburbs on the edge of an industrial city (Lille) where in most families the father of the household is either out of work, or drunk, or both, or has run away; the local schoolmaster takes it on himself to fill the rôle of father, a job which Phillipe Torreton carries out brilliantly, aided and abetted by his girl-friend, Maria Pitarresi, who doesn't.
But perhaps the brilliance of the film resides in the sheer pace, as the cameraman has to keep his wits about him so as not to lose those gestures, in what must be the nearest thing to live, unrehearsed cinema: above all in the rapid shots among the small children, where there is no acting or interpretation - it is all too direct, too immediate for any kind of infantile amateur acting classes.
There may be a few technical weaknesses due to the way in which the film just had to be made, but the end result is monumental, a brilliant though agonising document.
Every European politician should be forced to see it: maybe a few of them would wake up and decide to do something useful.