It All Starts Today

"Teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart, And the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be." - Parker Palmer, a veteran educator

Daniel Lefebvre (Philippe Torreton) is teacher and director of the école maternelle, a pre-school open to children ages 2 to 6 in northern France. In Bernard Tavernier's deeply moving film, It All Starts Today, the children are the stars. Their faces and loving smiles shine through the grimness of their circumstances. Based on the notebooks of Tavernier's son-in-law Dominique Sampiero, a provincial teacher, the film is about the difficulties and challenges of children but is also a tribute to the courage and commitment of teachers. Lefebvre is a poet whose voice-over narration adds a touching lyricism to the film. "We'll tell our children it was hard", he writes. "Piles of stones placed one by one. We'll tell the children it was hard but their fathers are lords and this is their legacy. A pile of stones and the courage to lift them".

The school is in a town that has been hit hard by the closure of the coal mine, and where unemployment has reached 34 percent. Lefebvre is a gentle and compassionate teacher but a tough administrator who tries to shake the political bureaucracy into providing adequate programs for the school. He protests loudly against budget cuts and insensitive government regulations and the shortage of trained professionals. Lefebvre shows anger and frustration in the scene where he slams the door in the face of a visiting social worker, and when he storms into the Mayor's office to rail against cutbacks in the school lunch program. He is hardest on himself, however, when tragedy befalls an alcoholic mother and her family, and when his common-law wife Valeria's (Maria Pitteresi) young son Remi (Lambert Marchal) gets into trouble, challenging his commitment to return to the school the following year.

The problems of the school are severe but not exaggerated. Being the husband of a pre-school teacher I know the kinds of circumstances that parents and teachers face every day and they are not that different from those shown in the film. Tavernier does not idealize the poor or romanticize their circumstances but shows us conditions as they exist. This is a message film and we do get the message, but it doesn't seem preachy because it comes from a passion that springs naturally from the lives of the characters. But the magic of the film lies in the children themselves. There is no acting or interpretation. The camera zooms around the school with lightning speed catching the spontaneity of the children singing, dancing, talking, playing, and just being themselves. It All Starts Today does not offer any simple solutions and can be dark, but, at the end, when each child comes up to the camera for a final smile I felt only lightness and joy. Being around children and adults with courage will do that.

It always happens. When things get tough, local, State, and the federal government save money on the backs of the poor first. Who, besides the poor suffer, the teachers, of course? This is a magnificent story of pre-school teachers coping with abuse, neglect, incest, and all forms of child abuse while the government agencies that are supposed to help just make excuses.

The school is falling apart and being broken into for food, and the school board, and the police do little or nothing to help. Families are coping with 34% unemployment and the resulting depression. Sound familiar? It is also happening all over America, not just in France.

The teacher training even tells new teachers that they will be social workers more than teachers. It is difficult to understand how learning can take place with children who are hungry, cold, and abused.

Philippe Torreton does an excellent job as Daniel Lefebvre in writer/director Bertrand Tavernier's film. His frustration and anger shows whether he is throwing out a child welfare worker or yelling at the Mayor for cutting lunches. All the while he has to deal with problems at home and his ailing father.

In a region devastated by the closing of coal mines, and where one worker out of three is unemployed, Bertrand Tavernier tells us the problems of a nursery school's director who wants to improve the social conditions of those people.

He is the only hope for depressive parents but bureaucrats want him to look only after the easy cases forgetting about the problem children.

The challenge of throwing more than thirty 3 to 6 years old kids in the scramble as been taken up: their natural is convincing... and it goes for the director too.

I took part wholeheartedly with the pains and joys of the characters and lived it as if it was real life.

If we see the movie by Bertrand Tavernier, we could draw a conclusion that schools nowadays in France are worse than let us say before the First World War. Apparently there are not sufficient financial means for the schools and the teachers are confronted with the enormous task of holding everything together. The schoolmaster Daniël Lefebre (Philippe Torreton) manages to be as well a celebration-organizer, a social worker, a psycho-therapeutist, a pediatrist and ... a good teacher. Does he have a private life? He must be an idealist. As long as such people continue to work for the good of the upcoming youth, our civilization has less chances to fall apart. This movie is an encouragement for all good teachers in the world.

"It All Starts Today" is an open ended slice-of-life tale which takes us into the world of a good-hearted, dedicated, and hard working French Kindergarten teacher who has a lot more on his plate than finger painting. Protag Daniel (Torrenton) not only teaches but runs interference for abused kids, wrestles with the local mayor for funding, contends with vandals, and juggles a host of economic, social, and school political issues all the while maintaining a relationship with his girl friend and her son. Though there isn't much of an arc to the story, this well crafted film does create a likeable character who shows us that the opportunity for heroism exists everywhere in life...even kindergarten. (B)