Laura Wandel’s debut feature was Belgium’s official submission for the Oscars: a kid’s-eye-view nightmare of playground bullying impossible to watch without a sick, jittery feeling of rage and dread. The original French title is “Un Monde” – “A World” – and the playground is a universe of fear which we all edit out of our adult memories.
A rather amazing seven-year-old newcomer called Maya Vanderbeque stars as Nora, seen mostly in extreme, searching closeup. Just the opening shot of her crying face supplies pretty much enough emotional charge to power the whole film. Nora is just starting school, and her sobbing mini-drama-queen distress at the school gates discomforts her dad (Karim Leklou) and especially her older brother Abel (Günter Duret), a wannabe tough guy who doesn’t want his clingy kid sister embarrassing him in the playground. When she witnesses him being bullied by the other boys – with whom Abel had hoped to bully someone else – she tells the teachers and her dad, thus humiliating him and breaking a whole unwritten statute book about not snitching.
At first, Nora artlessly tries informing on the bullies to her own teacher, Mme Agnès (Laura Verlinden) whose ineffective attempts at rebuking the boys appears to irritate their teacher, whose prerogative this actually is, and who perhaps sees Mme Agnès’s intervention as an implied criticism of her professionalism. And so at the crucial moment she has neither the time nor the inclination to back her up: a fatal concession. And when Nora’s dad clumsily tries yelling at the bullies, it naturally makes things far worse, a mishandled situation which metastasises horribly.
A world of adult indifference is revealed: those supposed authority figures are way out of the frame, as remote as the uniformed prison guards patrolling the exercise yard. As with Yasmin Reza’s stage-play Carnage, filmed by Roman Polanski in 2011, or perhaps the enigmatic schoolgates scene that closes Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Hidden, the power politics of kids has implications for the adults. The playground’s hidden theatre of violence echoes in the headteacher’s office and in the kitchens at home, among the grownups whose own childhoods involved dutifully learning the lesson that violence is unacceptable – but who find that anger is still a natural instinct when it comes to protecting and being seen to protect.
As for Nora herself, the film shows us that she is not exactly a moral agent: she fiercely objects to bullying, but also unhelpfully denounces Abel’s failure to stand up for himself and objects to anyone’s failure to take her feelings into account. It is her tactless courage and willingness to intervene that is finally to make a difference – but she is also a bit of an egotist. There is a telling scene in which she hugs her beloved Mme Agnès with that same theatrically possessive desperation she showed in the opening shot, which makes the teacher just the tiniest bit impatient with her.
At just 72 minutes, this is a brief, intense feature: it’s possible that Wandel envisaged it as even shorter than it actually is, and perhaps its narrative tendons slacken a little after the initial spasm of horror. But what an incredible performance from Vanderbeque: an intuition of fear and pain and moral outrage that goes beyond acting.
• Playground is released on 22 April on cinemas.
