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Jacques Prévert's definition of education ("Stuffing full the heads of those condemned to live") is explicitly quoted, Twain's ("The path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty") is tacitly observed. The schoolteacher (Nathalie Baye) gets the blues, not a thunderbolt of despair but an accumulation that eventually has her dashing out of a moving car one morning. Beau (Gérard Lanvin) offers ribald wordplay, pal (Flore Fitzgerald) brings chocolate, Doc (Philippe Léotard) recommends seven days of rest. "I thought professional conscience was only for intellectuals." Reflective time is gently fractured, a Jean Gabin movie with the brother here and a recollection of a hapless colleague there. The smitten restaurateur (Michel Galabru) has no fond memories of the classroom but plenty of pithy remarks about the new decade: "These days, kids don't resemble their parents. They resemble the times." Bertrand Tavernier's approach is precise yet airy, gathering grace notes while refusing tidy solutions, just the empathetic scrutiny for a woman politely on the edge. (The couple's quarrels benefit from off-center staging—she soaks in a bathtub while he complains about unsweetened coffee, a kitchen argument in the space of eggs unsuccessfully whisked for an omelet.) "At this rate, you're old at the age of 20." Lyon views, Vuillard outdoors versus the geometry of a metro station. A trip home, where Dad (Jean Dasté) sits immobilized yet a close-up reveals the still-shining eyes of the larky professeur from Vigo's Zéro de Conduite. "The hardest part is to listen, but the kids don't know that yet," wisdom from a certain visiting clockmaker (Philippe Noiret). So it goes with the heroine, she's the lonesome crone in the apartment across from hers and the overwhelmed young student on the park bench, not suddenly "cured" but able to beam at children discussing Molière. "They help me to live." Tavernier revisits the calling in It All Starts Today. With Marie-Louise Ebeli, Philippe Delaigue, Geneviève Vauzeilles, and Nils Tavernier.
--- Fernando F. Croce |