Director: Bertrand Tavernier
"During the making of a film, I try to keep a critical distance. Even when a particular scene ot performance moves me. I try to avoid being blinded by any overly powerful emotions, though there have been times when I've been deeply affected." Bertrand Tavernier
The French seem to be the only filmmakers in Europe who continually make personal political dramas about working class people. This amazing film by Bertand Tavernier is one of the best films of the year although you wouldn’t guess it if you saw the absurdly sentimental trailer they are using to promote it.
Don’t be fooled by the trailer of IT ALL STARTS TODAY though because what’s most remarkable about this film is the way Tavernier restrains from using manipulative, tear inducing drama or theatrics even though every step of the way the film begs to become a tearjerker. Tavernier knows that by retaining a distance the film is all the more powerful since we are made to relate to real life and real characters; not fake melodrama.
Philippe Torreton plays Daniel, a pre-school teacher in an economically depressed region of Northern France who every day faces the difficulty of large classes, kids who don’t show up for school and unemployed, poor parents who can’t afford the small sum to keep their child in school. The first big drama -- that tells us all is not well -- comes when a parent, pushing a baby carriage, arrives at the school drunk and collapses at her child’s feet.
After she runs away from embarrassment, Daniel is left with the two kids. Looking for help, he calls the local social workers clinic but they refuse to help and hang up on him. Daniel, who ultimately takes the situation into his own hand, becomes extremely angry until he is confronted by a social worker (Nadia Kaci) who makes him realize that in that particular community there is a disproportionate ratio of only one social worker for 200 students.
IT ALL STARTS TODAY is a film about teachers who have to expand their jobs to include being community leaders, counselors and baby sitters. The film lets us know that life is difficult for teachers, something we may already know, but it shows that with perseverance and determination there can be solutions to the seemingly impossible dilemmas facing public schools.
Philippe Torreton – who is one of the few professional actors in the cast -- gives such a powerfully mesmerizing performance that if the Academy saw it he would easily receive an Oscar nomination. Besides having a great presence, part of the beauty of his performance is the amount of energy that he infuses into each scene. Thanks to the strength of the script he isn’t a one-dimensional character. He runs the school with professionalism, handles the kids with tact and skill yet ironically, at home, he has a bad relationship with his son-in-law.
Sometimes there is an abundance of dramatic circumstances: Daniel’s father becomes sick, tragedy strikes one of the families in the neighborhood and the kids (like most kids) are heartbreakingly helpless and cute. But Tavernier keeps an admirably reserved distance.
What’s great about IT ALL STARTS TODAY, besides the overall quality, is that it is not a feel good film. Like the best political dramas it refuses to tie up the various subplots and make for a cop out simplistic ending. Best of all perhaps, it has had such an impact on the particular community it portrays that the school, used in the film, has been renamed in honor of the director. And it’s been reported, in various news stories, that today the teachers in the school are finding new and creative ways to deal with the problems that still beleaguer the school and the community.
- Matt Langdon
