Introductory note. This was the last film I saw before the great confinement began. It has now been over two weeks since the cinemas were shut. Cinema is a strange beast. The value of theatre as a social tool is self-evident. The day the theatres reopen people will be on their feet applauding no matter the show. The actors will applaud the audience and the audience will applaud the actors and this is exactly as it should be. There’s a tradition of thousands of years of culture which will be being upheld, a tradition which has vanquished plagues, fires, puritans and dictatorships. Cinema is a more private experience. It always feels off-key to me when people applaud a film. No matter how moving or significant the film, it should be greeted with a murmur of appreciation, the contemplation of the credits, the shared sense of having participated in an experience which borders on the religious. Ever since I first started attending the cinema to watch films I have always felt as though the cinema is a second home. There are few places I would rather be if the world were to come to an abrupt end. Perhaps if this goes on much longer we should break into Cinemateca and live there, projecting films through the darkness. Perhaps this is the key to the religious beauty of cinema: the way in which it uses light to transform our darkness. It also explains why television will always be its poor cousin, no matter what they tell you nowadays. On the bad days, and there will be bad days in all of this, I sometimes wonder if Le Brio might not be the last film I ever see in a cinema. Fortunately the good days do battle with the bad ones, and I conclude there will be more moments of sheer luminescence to come. I also give thanks to the brothers Lumière and those others who helped to construct one of the great wonders of the modern age.
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There’s something slightly uncomfortable about Yvan Attal’s modern day Pygmalion narrative. On the one hand the message is clearly supposed to be a positive one for French second gen immigrants. You can make it to the upper echelons of society if that’s your ultimate intention. On the other it postulates that you’re going to need the dedicated help of a self-confessed anarcho-racist to get there. Auteuil plays the loose cannon, Mazard, a brilliant law professor who cites Nietzsche and Baudelaire in his classes, and has a fierce libertarian streak. In his mind it’s fair game to insult minorities, presumably on the basis that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Camélia Jordana’s Neïla is the winsome young student lawyer who he is designated to give a course of intensive teaching, in order to get him off the hook of a racist attack he made against her which has been uploaded to Facebook.
The film opens with a brilliant sequence where Neïla rushes across Paris, late, to arrive at the Uni. She walks into a vast, 21st C lecture hall, with hundreds of students hunched over their laptops as Auteuil’s professor speaks to them using a microphone. The scene feels like an embodiment of Western European modernity, where lawyers are mass-produced, where the sheer scale of life means even education is dehumanised. However, thereafter, the film slips towards both cliche and a more ambiguous (and less ambitious) mode. The Pygmalion story contains a twist, in that Neïla ultimately, follows her own path, rather than that dictated by her guru, but it feels as though the film is wary of damaging the feelings of Auteuil’s Mazard, eeking out a happy ending which never feels deserved. Attal seems to pull his punches as the film drifts towards a feel good conclusion. It feels like a film which isn’t entirely sure how it wants to situate itself within the context of an evolving modern France.
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