In its linchpin act, Monsieur Lazhar’s eponymous character chokes back tears to tell an unsympathetic immigration hearing why he sought refuge in Canada from death threats in his native Algeria.
Paving the way for a safer future for his family to join him, the very next scene sees Bachir Lazhar slowly rooting through a box of his wife’s possessions. Lead actor, Mohamed Fellag, appears crushed under the weight of memories and oppression. Primarily a comic performer in France, Fellag’s nuanced turn as the hopeful asylum seeker come evocative supply teacher, is probably the film’s biggest strength.
Pure Oscar fodder, these two scenes alone inevitably secured Philippe Falardeau’s film (finally in UK cinemas now) a place alongside this year’s Best Foreign Language Film nominees. Iranian A Separation would dominate the category; a shoe-in after its Best Original Screenplay nomination.
After the suicide of a popular teacher at a snow-covered Canadian primary school, Lazhar steps in to deal with a shock-struck class of pre-teens. An old-fashioned presence unfamiliar with modern – or, as it materialises, any – teaching techniques, he champions antiquated grammatical methods, administers clips around the ears and inflicts the complex prose of Balzac to the class.
Lazhar expects too much from the children. The film’s major shortcoming is that Falardeau does too.
In one scene, Lazhar’s star pupil, Alice (splendidly played by Sophie Nélisse who won a Genie Award; Canada’s BAFTAs), gives a speech to her classmates about the selfishness of suicide. The content and oratory is worthy of somebody quadruple her age with a psychology PhD and a lifetime of experience.
She and her friend Simon – possibly responsible for the death by publicly claiming that his teacher kissed him – argue like jaded lovers. Their altercations alternate between scenes of PE kits, nervous nosebleeds and playground horseplay. The juxtaposition is, at best, jarring and, at worst, bizarre.
Conversely, A Separation’s strength was that the parents reacted and squabbled like children, driven by ego and self-pity.
If Falardeau wanted to make a film about adults coping with loss then, he should have stuck to the arc of Lazhar’s touching sadness at being parted from his family. Instead, the kids are perversely used as vessels for complex commentaries on death, loss, violence and moral ambiguity, all of which they tackle with absurd levels of maturity.
Among such weighty ideas, it is probably uncharitable to pick up on plot holes as well. But the unlikelihood of Lazhar’s employ in the first place is such a gaping distraction that it mars the rest of the piece. The teaching staff lament that they are no longer allowed so much as to give a comforting hug to a pupil, yet an immigrant with no papers and fabricated references is allowed to slip through the “zero-tolerance” net to teach a class of emotionally vulnerable children. Not a CRB check in sight.
Perhaps this conceit should be forgiven, as the film is best viewed like one of the fables that Lazhar teaches. But where a fable is a concise moral commentary with a clear message, Monsieur Lazhar is an over-complicated narration, unsure of who or what it is trying to edify or vilify.
Monsieur Lazhar; 2011; Dir: Philippe Falardeau; Stars: Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, Brigitte Poupart; 94 mins; 3/10; 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film)
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