The "fracture sociale" in France between the prosperous majority and an increasingly marginalised and alienated underclass is a subject which Bertrand Tavernier has already explored in such films as L627 and L'Appat, and in the documentary, De l'autre cote du periph. Like those films, It All Starts Today is based on first-hand research, in this case culminating in a screenplay co-written by Tavernier's daughter and her partner, himself a head-teacher in the same part of Northern France where the story is set. Philippe Torreton plays the idealistic principal of a nursery school in an economically-depressed former mining town. Surrounded by deprivation and high unemployment, Torreton struggles to provide a level of basic comfort and nourishment for the children, some of them literally starving, who are brought to him each day. Hemmed in by bureaucratic restrictions and budgetary cutbacks, his attempts to force through changes in the local social services system meet with little success, and cause him to be branded as a trouble-maker, while the pressures of his work also cause tensions on his relationship with his girlfriend and her son.
While social marginalisation has formed the subject of many of the most important French films of the last few years, Tavernier's film-making style differs from the work of such younger directors as Bruno Dumont (La Vie de Jesus) or Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine) in telling its story from the point-of-view of its well-meaning, intellectual protagonist. As such, it offers a sharp contrast with the work, say, of Ken Loach (an obvious influence in other ways), in whose films employees of the state like Torreton are often depicted as the enemy. Here, the teachers and social workers are mostly fighting the good fight against cynicism and apathy, offering some hope that society has not completely fractured, and that basic human decency can prevail, an idea emphasised by the film's ending, which hovers uneasily between optimism and fantasy. In fact, in its liberal humanism, It All Starts Today is quite an old-fashioned film - not by any means a bad thing - its emotional punch given added weight by Tavernier's skilful storytelling and fluid style.
West Beirut Members and guests IFC, Dublin
Born in 1963, Ziad Doueiri left Beirut for the US at the age of 20, after spending his teenage years in the midst of the civil war which engulfed the city in the mid-1970s. His impressive debut film, described as "90 per cent autobiographical", tells the story of Tarek (Rami Doueiri), a 14-year-old Muslim boy who is overjoyed at first when Beirut is divided between the warring sides - mostly because his school, in the east of the city, is now inaccessible. With his friends he roams the streets, dodging gun-battles, looking for adventures, listening to American pop music and generally having fun. Meanwhile, his middle-class, politically radical parents agonise over whether they should flee or remain in their home.
Doueiri has worked behind the camera for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and his fresh, lively, unpretentious film shows signs of their influence, particularly in its black sense of humour and unpredictability. This is war as seen through the eyes of a mischievous adolescent, who views it as a licence to do whatever he wants ("the war granted me unbridled freedom", the director has said).
Beirut is depicted as a grotesque mix of playground and slaughterhouse - the scenes of violence, such as a bus massacre or a machine-gun attack on a street demonstration - are all the more unsettling for their black humour (another Tarantino touch, perhaps), while the slow descent into sullen misery as war and corruption wear the population down is convincingly handled. Compared to other conflicts of the last two decades, the Lebanese civil war has hardly been touched upon by feature film-makers, but West Beirut is a memorable depiction from a clearly talented film-maker.
