Adieu, Mr. Chips

It’ll be a spoiler of sorts to describe the opening scene of Monsieur Lazhar, but the movie itself doesn’t make much fuss about it, so here goes: It’s middle school, winter, just before the end of recess. One particular boy and one particular girl have a special rapport. There’s sharing, but also real tension. What’s going on with these two? Meanwhile, other kids are playing. The camera attends but does not intrude. The boy remembers a chore he must do and hurries inside. He peeks into one classroom and sees that a teacher has hanged herself.

The boy runs for help. The camera waits. The bell rings and the now-empty hallway fills with the suspense of wondering whether all the other kids are about to come rushing in to this same grim discovery. Another teacher appears and makes a frantic effort to stop them. But the girl pushes her way through, and she sees it, too.

Stepping away now to the opening credits seems like the right thing to do. It allows us a private moment with the horror and heartbreak at hand, but also a chance to revel in the beauty and tact with which writer-director Philippe Falardeau, adapting …velyne de la Chenelière’s play, has set everything up. No, Monsieur Lazhar is not just another greeting card of a movie, with just another inspirational teacher among schoolkids in need of inspiration. Obviously, it is a movie about mourning, but in Falardeau’s nontrivially light touch there is cause for optimism.

It’s also a movie about the protection of innocence—a gesture both heroic and highly presumptuous. The eponymous figure, played by Mohamed Fellag, is the teacher who arrives unexpectedly to replace the suicide, and perchance to broker the evolving rapport between that boy, Simon (…milien Néron), and that girl, Alice (Sophie Nélisse). As should come as no surprise, he finds that relations between parents and the school administration also are strained. Lazhar’s is not a job that many people would apply for, but it soon becomes clear how much he needs it: an Algerian by birth, he also has applied for political asylum. The broader setting here is Montreal, where the default language is French, the default behavior is politesse, and the substitute’s outsiderhood is nonetheless an issue. Bureaucratically, at least, his credentials don’t quite check out.

Needless to say, Lazhar’s acclimation to this workplace culture involves much expectation adjustment. First, he raises eyebrows by undoing the politically correct arrangement of his students’ desks, and baffling them with dictation from Balzac. Then, after reflexively dishing out a disciplinary smack on the back of Simon’s head, it’s Lazhar who winds up in trouble with the principal (Danielle Proulx), who lectures him on litigation-phobic prohibitions against physical contact—of any kind—between adults and kids. As a fed-up fellow teacher puts it, they’re to treat the students “like radioactive waste.” Might this have had something to do with Lazhar’s predecessor’s unequivocally aggressive self-destruction? Finally, Lazhar commits an apparently ultimate faux pas by noting the maturity with which Alice uses a class composition to cope with her grief, and wanting to share it with the school’s extended community.

The problem is that it’s a community fortified against itself. But another of the film’s feats of narrative economy is its refusal to prescribe some too-easy solution. There seems to be an understanding here that bereavement and politics both are overbearing enough in real life; movies about them do well when maintaining some poise. Because Monsieur Lazhar accumulates complexity by hewing to simplicity, its sheen of white, wintry-soft light offers clarity instead of just forgiving diffusion.

Best known for socially critical stand-up comedy, Fellag left Algeria himself in 1995 after a bomb exploded during one of his performances. He’d be within his rights to overplay the themes of Monsieur Lazhar, not to mention the man himself. But he and Falardeau seem to have made a pact not to let that happen. And they’ve made a film, therefore, with the authority but also the humility to remind us that civilization is indeed a delicate thing, with teachers among its bravest stewards.