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‘Elementary’ Review: French Docmaker Claire Simon Returns to the Schoolroom With Endearing Results
Observing daily life at a Paris elementary school, Claire Simon's doc 'Elementary' reveals much by standing back and letting its subjects converse.
If funding is tight at Makarenko Elementary, that doesn’t dampen the enthusiasm of its teaching staff, whose daily duties span the roles of educator, caregiver and counselor, attending to the special needs of certain individual students while while leading large, often cheerfully garrulous classes. More adventurous still is a song chosen for a music class: A poignant, extended scene observes a choir of second-graders singing a word-perfect rendition of “Dommage” by French hip-hop duo Bigflo & Oli, with its very adult reflections on loneliness, surrendered ambitions and domestic abuse. Even its most heated classroom exchanges are all in a day’s work — as are exceptions from routine like a rowdy field trip on a Seine riverboat through central Paris, its supervising teachers exhausted and amused in equal measure, or a costume parade through the residential streets of Ivry-sur-Seine, or, in the teariest of the film’s musical diversions, a graduation-day performance of Rihanna’s “Diamonds” that recalls the same song’s toughly empowering use in Céline Sciamma’s “Girlhood.” Through this patchwork of activity, Simon tacitly celebrates the labor, patience and creativity that goes into nurturing young minds — there’s no talk of budget or salary, but the selfless modesty of both is self-evident.
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