Ray Pride

To watch is to learn. To understand is to love. There are so many pure hopes one can hold for the documentary-film form.

Nicolas Philibert's "To Be and To Have" is a magnificent construction of empathy, a quietly heartfelt portrait of a dozen or so pupils in a single-room school in an isolated French farming village, a bitty boite, in the middle of winter in the midst of farmland.

The town is in Auvergne, called Saint-Etienne sur Usson, and the children are named Alize, Axel, Guillaume, Jessie, Jojo, Johann, Jonathan, Julien, Laura, Letitia, Marie-Elisabeth, Natalie and Olivier. One-hundred-and-four minutes after the film begins, you know them, by name, by face, by quirk.

The teacher's name is Georges Lopez. He's 55, soon to retire. He could be the portrait of an urban academic: Black sweater, groomed gray goatee, rimless glasses. He is all patience and quiet experience. We watch his concerted cajoling of these children, assured yet kind, and Philibert constructs his film as the illusion of an inevitable, serene succession of lessons floating past, like a French roman fleuve, a river of a narrative. Philibert has suggested his is a film "without a subject... Not on but at school." Its rustic character led to accusations of sentimentality. It is more than a minor-key fairytale. Instead, it is a laboratory for us to follow an experiment.

"To Be and To Have" is a portrait of a group of individuals. It is admiring of a time and of an intimate pedagogical style that has largely passed in Western culture. These days whiled away at school through the change of seasons, with the kids aged from primary to middle school, are idyllic enough to have elicited charges of the movie being reactionary. It's a song to individuality, actually.

It is also baby-fever dream. The camera regards the children, curious, unformed, charming without effort, quietly beguiling, individuals as cute and mysterious as kittens. You think of innocence, and you wonder, when was yours lost? A viewer's attention might drift from Philibert's direct narrative, but now another child behaves in a fashion that is, precisely, childlike. Darling and undomesticated, a life's damage still minor, the hopeful glow of potential, of better lives, or a better world. Lopez is also a dream of a teacher, implying an intimacy, a consoling, edifying awareness of the past and its lesson, instead of being the human equivalent of a hen, learning to give over golden eggs. The school seems like an extension of home instead of an assembly line.

The kids essentially ignore the film camera. The moment we might realize that, Philibert cuts to cattle being herded in the rain, their gaze balefully regarding the camera operators and audience.

But there are eruptions. We glimpse Lopez' loving nudges toward socialization, individuality, the crafting of means to learn. Some kids get mad, some fight, some are inexpressive with spite. We see the fearful, ragged pissedness of temper one can't yet comprehend.

There is the patient gaze of the teacher and of the documentary camera. Two older boys who've fought, their elbows rest on place mats that are maps of France. While being lectured that words can hurt more than actions, the larger of the two is compulsively cracking his knuckles. Dealing with a troubled boy whose father has cancer, Philibert cuts to a Kiarostami-like shot of a field of wheat, ruffling with wind. One stark tree waves, too.

Philibert's eye is more tender than cute, this isn't "Merde! Kids do the darndest things!" At one boy's home, as his mother tries to figure out his math problems, the camera catches a little sister with artlessly tangled hair, she's bruised, cut, with scabby legs and in constant motion. "A real child!" You want to cry out. The distraction has been sly: we now have the gift of a shot in the family kitchen like a seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. Mom and boy still sit, but there are four other adult figures leaned over the tablecloth, over the problem, struggling with its elements.

"To Be and To Have" is a humane film, a thoughtful, hope-filled masterpiece of empathy. "Is this place better than Tahiti?" one child asks, and they know the answer. Lopez tells his ambitions near the end of the film, and the expression on his face when the last child leaves for summer tells a story you can't forget.

"To Be and to Have" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2003-11-19)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
As compiled by Dominique Auvray, a friend of the late French novelist Marguerite Duras ("The Lover"), "Marguerite: A Reflection of Herself" is an interesting amalgam
(2003-11-13)

Fearless
"Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" has a readymade audience in the acolytes of Patrick O'Brian's twenty seafaring novels
(2003-11-13)

Potter's field
"Repainting the Sistine Chapel": That's the insult one journalist hurled at Keith Gordon for having the audacity to shoot Dennis Potter's film script revisiting his "The Singing Detective"
(2003-11-13)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2003-11-13)

Blackbird flies next door
(2003-11-13)

Tip of the Week
(2003-11-05)

The revolution will not be realized
(2003-11-05)

I miss the innocence
(2003-11-05)

Short Runs
(2003-11-05)

Tip of the Week
(2003-10-29)

Looking for Mr. Bad Cop
(2003-10-29)

Passed is prologue
(2003-10-29)

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