It’s not everyday a fifty minute one-act monologue becomes a crowd-pleasing feature film garlanded with award after award, including an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film. But that’s just what’s happened to Évelyne de la Chenelière’s French-Canadian stage play, Monsieur Lazhar.
Director Philippe Falardeau has also adapted the play, taking it from an understated, theatrical monologue reliant upon intimacy and charisma, to a cinematic, multi-charactered narrative.
The film begins with the bustle of the playground in the middle of a Montreal winter and children, teachers and the occasional parent litter the school premises. But the joys of watching the innocent playground antics of the young students are soon cut short as two children discover their popular teacher dead by hanging in the classroom.
As psychologists are bought in (or more correctly, as one concerned parent points out, only one for the whole class) and the classroom stripped of memories and repainted, Principal Ms. Vaillancourt (award-winning actress Danielle Proulx) is charged with finding a replacement.
Enter Monsieur Lazhar, an Algerian refugee who is dealing with his own traumas of having lost his entire family in a politically motivated attack in Algiers.
He does not come through the normal channels, repercussions of which are to be felt at the end of the film. But Monsieur Lazhar establishes a powerful rapport with his charges as the film sensitively handles the deep trauma of the children, children who are as fragile as the recurrent chrysalis in the writings of Balzac he likes to read aloud to mystified 12 year-olds.
Lazhar bonds in particular with Alice, one of the witnesses to the body of her teacher, and it is their underplayed relationship that is central to this quiet, deeply sad feature. It is the mutual respect and like of each other – she searches on the Internet for images of Algiers – that pushes Lazhar to allow the children to voice and explore their trauma, in spite of being warned off by the Principal.
Monsieur Lazhar is a beautifully understated, dignified feature quietly unfolding with a superb central performance from Mohamed Fellag, a renowned comedian in his native Algeria and making his North American debut. But the stars are undoubtedly the children themselves and in particular Sophie Nelisse and Emilien Neron. It is their discovery that sets off the narrative and as the year passes by, it is their discovery of a deeper understanding of what happened that can provide a closure.
Personal ratings: 4 stars
Monsieur Lazhar
- Directed by Philippe Falardeau (It’s Not Me, I Swear!, Congorama)
- Written by Philippe Falardeau (It’s Not Me, I Swear!, Congorama)
- Produced by Luc Dery (Incendies, It’s Not Me, I Swear!), Kim McCraw (Incendies, It’s Not Me, I Swear!)
- Starring Mohamed Fellag (Intimate Enemies, Top Floor Left Wing), Sophie Nelisse, Emilien Neron