New York Times Review of Film the Family
Critic's Pick
'Playground' Review: A Cosmos Story
In this stunning Belgian drama, a fiddling girl and her brother go to school, read, write, fight and larn some vicious lessons about life.
- Playground
- NYT Critic's Pick
- Directed by Laura Wandel
- Drama
- 1h 12m
In a perfect hour and 12 minutes, "Playground" tells the sweeping, intimate story of a child'south coming into consciousness. Set almost entirely within the confines of an elementary school and its grounds, it takes place in an unidentified Belgian neighborhood at an institution that's equally colorless, generic and unwelcoming as whatever educational sausage manufactory. There, girls and boys are turned into students, playmates, friends, adversaries, future citizens and dutiful workers. They study and obey but sometimes they also resist.
It'south the outset day of schoolhouse when you lot run across Nora (an amazing Maya Vanderbeque), a plaintive 7-year-old with short pilus and worried eyes. She'south hugging her blood brother, Abel (Günter Duret, a heartbreaker), who's slightly older and a touch on taller, her optics start to flood as her father (Karim Leklou) silently stands by. Her face is bunched in a knot of anxiety and her grip is tenacious, unyielding. As the children clutch at each other, their bodies fused and foreheads touching, Abel whispers words of comfort. "Don't worry," he gently tells Nora, simply before a supervisor pulls them apart. "I'll encounter you at break time."
This reunion never occurs. Instead — every bit happens recurrently in this vehement, intelligent moving picture — grown-ups become in the style, blinkered by their obeisance to rules, regulations and pedagogical imperatives. Forced to consume lunch separately from Abel, Nora sits downwardly with another girls; in time, she also settles into schoolhouse. She makes friends and expands her horizons: She learns how to tie her shoes. "Skilful task," a girl says, expressing support with a tinge of developed condescension. Merely school also brings harrowing trouble when Abel becomes the target of barbarous bullying — for Nora, it is a devastating introduction to the larger world.
This is the showtime characteristic from the author-director Laura Wandel, and information technology's a knockout, as flawlessly constructed as it is harrowing. By the time the start scene has ended, Wandel has fix the anxious mood, introduced her characters, established the visual design and created a richly inhabited earth that'southward disturbingly familiar. (If y'all don't flash on your childhood with at to the lowest degree a few pangs while watching it, you are made of stronger stuff than I am.) From the sights and sounds of Nora existence escorted into school — the image darkens as the sound of children's voices rising to a roar — you lot are already primed for the worst.
You lot're also firmly in Wandel's grip. The image of distressed children tin't help but seize your attention (and quickly stoke your sympathies), but the scene'southward tenderness also holds yous. In "Playground," the camera never points down at Nora, but is positioned at her centre level, as if information technology were another kid. This creates an immediate, palpable intimacy, a gentleness that'due south accentuated by the tightness of the shot, the soft light and Nora's tears. You're at her side, and that's where yous remain. You come across what she sees in her immediate orbit, just yous also see how she sees, allowing yous to step into her limited sphere and feel her narrow sightlines.
In "Playground," Nora is the narrative pivot, and because she's most often positioned in the center of the frame, she is too the movie's visual center point, its lodestar. But what she understands about her new, uncharted world is sharply circumscribed. She sees simply doesn't always know, and while you lot may grasp the state of affairs, Wandel also shrewdly withholds data, which puts yous on the same uncertain existential level every bit Nora. Because Nora is so tiny there are moments when you lot don't even see the faces or upper bodies of the adults, a vantage that recalls the few peeks of grown-ups in early Charlie Brown comics.
The story gathers momentum equally the bullying dangerously escalates amid short scenes of Nora's everyday school life. She goes to course, reads and writes, and endures time on a balance beam and in a swimming pool. She watches, and she learns. In one scene, a instructor orders her and other girls to circumvolve their arms in different directions, an exercise generally in submission. The school is shaping minds, but Wandel reminds you that it's likewise disciplining bodies. On the playground, the children — through their play and their sadism — mimic these adult lessons in ability, creating a dissimilar educational regime.
A work of striking integrity and forcefulness, "Playground" owes a debt to the influential Belgian filmmaker brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, both in its formal and thematic concerns. Equally in their movies, Wandel is charting a moral awakening and focusing on the questions that many movies rarely appoint. How practise we love, and why? How practise we go, who exercise we become? Wandel is telling the story of 1 kid, a tiny planet spinning in a mysterious, often disruptive, unsettled universe. (The original title is "Un Monde.") But she's likewise telling a story that in its piercing, sensitive detail and life-shaping arc is every bit familiar equally yours and mine.
Playground
Not rated. In French. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/movies/playground-review.html
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