Those of us who live in relative ease in North America
and other parts of the so-called "first world" rarely pause to
reflect on the silent suffering of the refugees among us--the loved ones they
have lost or left behind, the tragedies that have shattered their hopes, the
displacement that robs them of identity.
Nowhere is that experience more sensitively portrayed than in
"Monsieur Lazhar," which earned a host of film awards in Canada, an
Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, and a spot at number two on my
list of the best films of 2012.
Fittingly, the film tells us very little about the
experience of its title character in his home country of Algeria. When we first encounter him, he has appeared
in the office of a beleaguered middle school principal to apply for the job of
teaching a sixth grade class whose beloved teacher has recently hung herself in
the classroom. Lazhar is the only person
to step forward to teach the devastated class, so the principal hastily accepts
his report that he taught for 19 years in Algeria. She learns nothing of his circumstances
otherwise and, like most people in the film, displays little curiosity about
him as he enters the life of the school.
Lazhar carries his alien status stolidly. He is courtly, a bit stiff, and his approach
to the class seems at first overly formal; for example, he instructs the
students to move their desks from an egalitarian semi-circle into more
traditional rows, and gives them a dictation assignment from Balzac that is way
over their heads. But in time, the
children relax into the structure he imposes; with it comes a kind of freedom
that is missing from this typical North American school, which perceives itself
as free-thinking but actually embodies its own rigidity.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the school's
response to the teacher's suicide. A
grief counselor is called in and bans Lazhar from her meetings with the
children so as to "separate psychology from pedagogy." Lazhar is instructed not to discuss the suicide
with the class and is also informed of the school's "zero tolerance"
policy that forbids teachers from physical contact of any kind with
students. The school also enforces an
"anti-violence" policy that forbids such playground games as
"king of the hill'; as an apparent consequence, the other teachers seem to
marginalize a student who acts out but is clearly struggling after being the
one to discover the teacher hanging in the classroom. All of this is supposed to be aimed at
protecting the children, but it seems as though the adults are asserting their
own need for protection from the implications of the violence that has been
visited on the children by their trusted teacher.
Lazhar sees all this from the vantage point of the
outsider, generally acquiescing with little more than a slight shake of his
head to indicate his disbelief. It does
not seem to occur to anyone that Lazhar might actually have had experiences
that uniquely equip him to understand how to help the children. When he gently notes in a parent-teacher
conference that one of the students is perhaps overly fond of enforcing rules
with her classmates, her parents icily inform him, "You are not from here
so certain nuances escape you."
Perhaps. But he
is not the only one who is missing nuances.
Bit by bit the film reveals that Lazhar is in the midst of seeking
asylum following the murder of his wife and children in Algeria. He never speaks of it outside the asylum
proceedings, where he is treated not with care but with suspicion, and
subjected to harsh questioning as though he is attempting to scam the Canadian
government.
Lazhar's classroom, though, is a safe zone, for himself
and the students. One of his assignments
invites them to prepare presentations about the problem of violence, which
opens up space for a particularly astute student to express her grief over the
violence that disrupted their classroom.
Lazhar responds to the children's expressions of anger and confusion
with patience and kindness. Small
moments of attentiveness eventually lead to a larger moment of release for the
troubled boy who the rest of the school has written off. Ultimately Lazhar tells the students not to
look for meaning in their teacher's death because there isn't one. But he finds ways to guide them back to their
task as sixth graders, which is to emerge from a metaphorical chrysalis--the
school, their safe place--to fly free.
His efforts get him into trouble--and here again, his
experience resounds with that of many outsiders. His wisdom not only goes unrecognized; it
leads to his dismissal. The asylum
proceedings are a microcosm of his experience inside the school: they culminate in the pronouncement that what
he has been saying is true in the eyes of the law, not because of his testimony
but because of third-party verification.
The arrogance of the proceedings, in which a smug bureaucracy deems
itself qualified to pass judgment on the experience of an outsider while
according no regard for his own testimony, was almost more than I could bear to
watch.
But to the children, the pure of heart, this man is a
gift. This lovely film offers that gift
to the pure of heart among us.
No comments:
Post a Comment