During
the 1990s, French unemployment hit 10 percent. The province
of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (the same province featured in the recently
released Humanité)
had an unemployment rate of 33 percent, but government agencies
turned a deaf ear to the social consequences, according to
the fact-based story in Ça commence aujourd’hui
(It All Starts Today). Directed by Bertrand
Tavernier, the movie focuses on the one institution where
economic realities and social dislocations are perhaps most
clearly evident -- France’s government-sponsored but underfunded
nursery schools (école maternelle), which enroll children
aged 2-6 for six hours of guided activities by dedicated professionals.
Daniel Lefebvre (played by Philippe Torreton) is the principal
and teacher at the school in Hernaing near Valenciennes (though
students in the film are drawn from the Anzin school). Children
at the school exhibit such problems as deafness, child abuse,
incest, and malnutrition. In reaching out to students who
fail to attend regularly, Lefebvre uncovers alcoholism, absent
and negligent parents, and filthy homes with inadequate heating.
Schoolteachers, thus, must devote considerable energy to feeding
starving children, serving as surrogate parents who can love
the children, and identifying problems for government social
workers to handle. But government regulations appear to prevent
nurses, physicians, social workers, and even the town’s mayor
from providing assistance. Violations of government regulations
that increase the suffering of the people are uncorrected
because public agencies do not respond due to inadequate funds,
overworked personnel, and excessive paperwork to obtain approval
for anything out of the ordinary. One day Lefebvre calls Child
Welfare Services to provide transportation for a child whose
alcoholic parent is physically unable to take her home at
the end of the day, only to have the agency hang up on his
distress call; he must then violate regulations by driving
the child home. With problems of his own at home, Lefebvre
erupts the next time a social worker arrives on a routine
visit, forcibly ejecting her from the school while telling
her that the school will not admit anyone from Child Welfare
Services until the agency decides to deal with the real problems
of the people. His display of anger and frustration works.
Thereafter, help arrives in the person of Samia (played by
Nadia Kaci), a nurse who makes a health assessment of the
children and summons a physician, who in turn orders urgently
needed medical tests for certain children. Samia also arranges
to reassign an abused child to a foster home. But one mother,
during the bitter winter, decides to take her own life and
that of her child when all her pleas for help to overcome
an illegal action by the electric company to leave them in
darkness and without heat are ignored. Although Levebvre contemplates
resignation after a receiving a poor rating on teaching methods
from an insensitive educational supervisor who appears to
know very little about educating preschool children, the joy
Levebvre experiences when the children perform in public inspires
him to continue to fight the battle. The most mirthful parts
of the movie indeed occur when the children respond joyously
in and out of class, assuring filmviewers that extraordinary
efforts to overcome bureaucratic inertia are indeed well worth
the effort. For viewers outside France, the extraordinary
teaching methods and results of France’s preschools are exemplary,
quite a contrast with America’s daycare zoos. The French appreciation
of creative arts is also stressed in the film as the antithesis
of the government’s cost-benefit analysis. It All Starts
Today, thus, depicts right-wing President Jacques
Chirac as trying to Americanize the educational system and
Thatcherize the bureaucracy in a vain effort to solve the
economic crisis. As a movie demonstrating the tragic impact
of austere financing and bureaucratic flimflam on the lives
of desperate people and an entire generation of children,
the Political Film Society has nominated It All Starts
Today for an award as best film on the need for greater
democracy and greater respect for human rights as well as
best exposé of the year 2000. MH
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