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PARIS
SHORTCHANGES CHILDREN TO "SAVE" THE FRENCH ECONOMY
 During
the 1990s, French unemployment hit 10 percent. The province
of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (the same province featured in the recently
released Humanité)
had an unemployment rate of 33 percent, but government agencies
turned a deaf ear to the social consequences, according to
the fact-based story in Ça commence aujourd’hui
(It All Starts Today). Directed by Bertrand
Tavernier, the movie focuses on the one institution where
economic realities and social dislocations are perhaps most
clearly evident -- France’s government-sponsored but underfunded
nursery schools (école maternelle), which enroll children
aged 2-6 for six hours of guided activities by dedicated professionals.
Daniel Lefebvre (played by Philippe Torreton) is the principal
and teacher at the school in Hernaing near Valenciennes (though
students in the film are drawn from the Anzin school). Children
at the school exhibit such problems as deafness, child abuse,
incest, and malnutrition. In reaching out to students who
fail to attend regularly, Lefebvre uncovers alcoholism, absent
and negligent parents, and filthy homes with inadequate heating.
Schoolteachers, thus, must devote considerable energy to feeding
starving children, serving as surrogate parents who can love
the children, and identifying problems for government social
workers to handle. But government regulations appear to prevent
nurses, physicians, social workers, and even the town’s mayor
from providing assistance. Violations of government regulations
that increase the suffering of the people are uncorrected
because public agencies do not respond due to inadequate funds,
overworked personnel, and excessive paperwork to obtain approval
for anything out of the ordinary. One day Lefebvre calls Child
Welfare Services to provide transportation for a child whose
alcoholic parent is physically unable to take her home at
the end of the day, only to have the agency hang up on his
distress call; he must then violate regulations by driving
the child home.
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With
problems of his own at home, Lefebvre erupts the next time
a social worker arrives on a routine visit, forcibly ejecting
her from the school while telling her that the school will
not admit anyone from Child Welfare Services until the agency
decides to deal with the real problems of the people. His
display of anger and frustration works.
Thereafter,
help arrives in the person of Samia (played by Nadia Kaci),
a nurse who makes a health assessment of the children and
summons a physician, who in turn orders urgently needed
medical tests for certain children. Samia also arranges
to reassign an abused child to a foster home. But one mother,
during the bitter winter, decides to take her own life and
that of her child when all her pleas for help to overcome
an illegal action by the electric company to leave them
in darkness and without heat are ignored. Although Levebvre
contemplates resignation after a receiving a poor rating
on teaching methods from an insensitive educational supervisor
who appears to know very little about educating preschool
children, the joy Levebvre experiences when the children
perform in public inspires him to continue to fight the
battle. The most mirthful parts of the movie indeed occur
when the children respond joyously in and out of class,
assuring filmviewers that extraordinary efforts to overcome
bureaucratic inertia are indeed well worth the effort. For
viewers outside France, the extraordinary teaching methods
and results of France’s preschools are exemplary, quite
a contrast with America’s daycare zoos. The French appreciation
of creative arts is also stressed in the film as the antithesis
of the government’s cost-benefit analysis. It All
Starts Today, thus, depicts right-wing President
Jacques Chirac as trying to Americanize the educational
system and Thatcherize the bureaucracy in a vain effort
to solve the economic crisis. As a movie demonstrating the
tragic impact of austere financing and bureaucratic flimflam
on the lives of desperate people and an entire generation
of children, the Political Film Society has nominated It
All Starts Today for an award as best film on the
need for greater democracy and greater respect for human
rights as well as best exposé of the year 2000. MH.
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