Life Lessons

Class act: Lopez (right) with students Aliz, Jojo and Marie.

A one-classroom school opens onto the world in To Be and To Have.

by Sam Adams

Nicolas Philibert's documentary, To Be and To Have, which follows a year in the life of a one-classroom school in rural France, opens with an image of townspeople herding cattle. The parallel between cattle-herding and primary education may not be intentional, but it's not out of place. As the head of a classroom whose 13 students range in age from 3 to 11, teacher Georges Lopez is as much traffic cop as educator, giving the small children pictures to color while he teaches their elders fractions. The lessons they learn aren't always those from textbooks. Observes Jojo, a mischievous younger boy with a Tintin haircut, "It's you who give the orders, but when we grow up, we'll order our children around."

In the small town of Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, there's no neat division between life inside the classroom and life outside it. Julien, a stocky older boy, takes a spin on the family tractor before settling in at the cramped kitchen table to do his math homework, while family members slowly gather around and argue about whether he's doing it right. In addition to brokering the usual playground disputes, Lopez talks to painfully shy Nathalie about her social anxieties, and counsels one boy whose father is dying of cancer. (Though it's hardly a plot twist, it feels like a sin to give the boy's identity away, since the revelation sheds light on a previous conflict.) But if the film's institutional setting and unobtrusive style call to mind the God's-eye-view documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, Philibert, unlike Wiseman, doesn't attempt to assemble such moments into an overarching thesis. He lets them stand as moments, almost deliberately disconnecting them with calming shots of rural life and the light filtering through the classroom's windows.

The extent to which Philibert has contrived to present a portrait of rural simplicity and old-fashioned teaching methods becomes clear when you see two children struggling with a photocopier; the presence of such modern machinery comes almost as a shock. (The school is equipped with computers, but you'd never know it from the film.) Though To Be and To Have is a literal translation of the film's French title, Être et avoir, it lends an unnecessarily philosophical cast to a phrase whose true meaning is closer to "the basics." ("Être" and "avoir" are the verbs you learn on your first day of French class.) It's significant that Philibert films Lopez during his second-to-last year in the school where he's taught for two decades, maximizing his old-pro status while avoiding the event of final goodbyes. There's no questioning Lopez's dedication -- in the one break with vérité style, he talks to the filmmakers about organizing mock classes as a child, with himself as the teacher and his friends as students -- but Philibert excludes any hint of private life, as if he's so devoted to teaching he hasn't bothered to develop a life outside the classroom. The more you think about it, the more you realize to what extent the movie's picture of simplicity -- the community's and its own -- is a carefully constructed illusion.

But if it's an illusion (and what film isn't?), it's an enrapturing one. The starkness of its setting throws the human relationships into relief: Lopez's patient mediation of a fight between Julien and red-faced, teary-eyed Olivier is a perfect microcosm of juvenile development, with Lopez walking them through the process of settling their differences with words instead of fists. It's in such moments that you see how deep his dedication to every aspect of his students' lives runs. Preparing Julien and Olivier, his oldest students, for the jump to middle school the next year, he tells them, "They won't be able to look after you personally there." You feel a sense of loss for Lopez, and what (at least in the movies) he represents: a patient but firm hand guiding his students through life, teaching them the basics, how to be and to have.

To Be and To Have

Directed by Nicholas Philibert A New Yorker Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

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