Monsieur Lazhar - A Review
Based around a grade school classroom in Montreal, Monsieur Lazhar encounters death, cross-cultural mores, asylum, and the emotions of children still learning how to deal with them. It gives deserved credit to the resilience and maturity of kids, which is often denied through shielding them with processes, rules, happy faces, and pigeoning them all into one category of “might-be-a-loose-cannon.” This director is smarter than that.
Skillfully, much of the character development comes about through small exchanges, and unspoken gestures of sharing and daily courtesy. A trait, Monsieur Lazhar states, is learned in the classroom.
Through the actors and their direction, there is nothing maudlin or formulaic about this film. It very quietly addresses the larger issues in our culture by exploring the rules set in place by adults, to teach children about friendship and the world around them. It places blame on the absurdities that when they encounter pain, teachers cannot touch; when they might have a problem at home, teachers cannot pry. And yet, what happens in the classroom is supposed to lay the foundation to create an abiding progeny, worthy of their citizenship with shoulders strong enough to carry forth the future of society.
But its all complex, and that multiplicity is addressed too.
Lazhar lies about his background, in a desperate measure to find a refuge from his Algerian, terror-stained, past. When his truth emerges to colleagues, we rally for him anyway. We would let him perform a surgery without having attended medical school. Perhaps the dead African violet he places on the windowsill to give color to the classroom is symbolic of the vast separation between what should happen, and what is possible for some of us. In providing a solid presence for the children of a broken classroom, he is given back what he needs to move forward from the past.
While the film takes place mostly in a school, it draws together the ways in which people exist among each other everywhere. Presenting a public life to the outside, while living with the private truths and lies of the past. The culmination of all the elements the film exposes—teacher/student relations, the experiences and circumstances that divide us, the weight and identity of where we come from—is christened in a single forbidden gesture where we find ourselves wishing that our children can be like Alice and their teachers like Lazhar.
You will walk away affected, and glad you came.