IT ALL STARTS TODAY (Bertrand Tavernier, 1999)

For the past thirty-five years former law student Bertrand Tavernier has been one of France’s most accomplished filmmakers—a great artist, some believe. I admire Tavernier’s work, but I have never warmed up to it. His dry, highly intelligent and sensible films have seemed too much, to me as well as others, a reaction against the nouvelle vague, that is, a selfconscious return to the “Tradition of Quality” in French cinema that Godard, Rivette and company opposed. (Early on, Tavernier collaborated with the “throwback” screenwriting team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost.) His is civilized, not exciting work; academic, literate, refined, impersonal.
     I do not care for Ça commence aujourd’hui, about a dedicated small-town kindergarten teacher. This should be my cup of tea, actually, (or should I say my glass of wine?), for the town is depressed owing to the closing of the coal mines upon which its economy depended. Normally I respond whole-heartedly to studies of blighted working-class lives, and indeed Tavernier’s film, as it looks around the children to some of their parents, reflects on desperation bred by unemployment. What about authenticity? The initial script was mostly written by Dominique Sampiero, an actual kindergarten teacher, upon whom the protagonist, Daniel Lefebvre, is based. (Other writers were two Taverniers: Bertrand and daughter Tiffany, Sampiero’s partner at the time.) There can be little doubt that Sampiero knows what he is writing about.
     But I find the whole film depressing, with its well-crafted demeanor and discreet style, its steely determination to avoid the sentimental pitfalls into which so many films about teachers and schoolchildren have fallen. This is all admirable. But what a tough film to care about! Its lives are recognizably human, and that’s a good thing; but we view them at such a distance! It doesn’t help that the film, which has been less about the children than about Lefebvre, is all the time headed to the clichéd summation of a flurry of snapshots of the adorable little ones. (Well, not all the little ones. There has been some unpleasant attrition.) In addition to the unseasoned greens, I would have wanted a bit more saucy meat.
     Philippe Torreton plays Lefebvre—brilliantly, some feel. I suppose so, if this means he is conveniently like his model, Sampiero. But there’s nothing searching or interesting about his kind of acting. It rests nicely on the screen even when Lefebvre loses his temper.