Re-up: Playground (2021)
Wandel’s sensory examination of school bullying and sibling relationships
Programming Note: My non-film watching work has recently meant time away from writing about movies, which means that for the next month I’ll be re-posting some write-ups on the best films I’ve seen in the past couple years. Happy viewing! Back in mid-October with fresh thoughts.
Country: Belgium
Director: Laura Wandel
Time: 1 hour and 12 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99), Google Play ($3.99)
What It Evokes: Childhood’s intensity, stakes, and confines
Childhood encompasses expansion within constriction. Worlds tend to be narrow, information limited, and often (though not always) circumscribed by adults. Within these confines, imagination forges narratives and meaning, building upon material realities in ways foreign to adulthood. Compressed spaces can turn into universes. Stakes become heightened in ways incomprehensible to the fully-grown. Precisely because children possess such rich interior lives (often inaccessible to adults), they can be some of the world’s great storytellers.
All the same, children’s worlds are hardly self-contained. They’re continually inundated with external stimuli, unforeseen constraints, foreign rules, and unfamiliar notions. The dissonance caused by imaginative expanses colliding with adult “realities” has inspired some great films about childhood, including the previously discussed The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). In turn, this dissonance partly explains children’s capacity for cruelty—itself a bid for control amidst an onslaught of ungovernable forces. Laura Wandel’s beautiful, difficult Playground, it’s French title Un Monde translates to “A World,” explores cruelty within one such all-encompassing space, school, from the vantage of seven-year-old Nora, whose older brother falls victim to bullying.
Playground gracefully manages to avoid the tropes associated with its subject matter by remaining true to its (very young) protagonist’s vision of social dynamics, while offering a trenchant exploration of the shifting nature of sibling relationships, particularly when stressed by events outside home. (No portion of the film takes place beyond the school’s immediate vicinity.) Abel, Nora’s brother, begins the film as her protector of sorts. Subsequently, the relationship inverts as he falls prey to the cruelty of others, unable to successfully navigate the social expectations and shame accompanied by a victimization seen through his little sister’s eyes—older siblings will understand this particular form of humiliation. Indeed, few films better capture W.H. Auden’s lines, “I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.”
Throughout the film, a handheld camera in continual close-up tracks Nora during a series of school-based activities. Her circumscribed world finds parallel in our proximity to her person amidst continually out-of-focus backgrounds. She dominates the screen—the camera remains almost always at eye-level—rendering viewers incapable of gaining (quite literally) perspective on the events at hand, in turn reinforcing their immediacy and intensity and mirroring the limited perspective afforded to those without long experience of life. To my mind, contemporary (French-language) Belgian film brings to mind the magisterial Dardenne brothers, who similarly use natural lighting, eschew musical scores, and employ handheld cameras in service of stories centered on marginal characters in Belgian society. Wandel’s film is less overtly political than the Dardenne’s work, though no less moving. It captures the collapse of idols that comes with growth: the moment when young individuals recognize those they admire are not immune from either weakness or the viciousness it sometimes provokes. And it feelingly charts the frustration, forgiveness, and love that confronts those failings.
Go Down The Belgian Film Rabbit Hole With:
Dardenne brothers — The Kid with a Bike (2011)
Chantal Akerman — Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)