School's Out

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Leia W Nov 2, 2018 Too ambiguous for its own good Based on Christophe Dufosse's 2002 novel, L'Heure de la sortie [lit. trans. The Time to Exit] combines the ecological themes of Take Shelter (2011) and First Reformed (2017), filtered through the milieu of Dead Poets Society (1989), but with the tonal qualities of Village of the Damned (1960) and Children of the Corn (1984). Director and co-writer Sebastien Marnier's second feature, is it a satire about liberal Generation Z snowflakes; is it an allegory about how difficult it can be for gifted children to fit in: is it a metaphor for the generation gap; is it about desensitisation; is it a desperate call-to-arms, a plea on behalf of tomorrow's adults that humanity is rapidly reaching the point-of-no-return in terms of the damage we are doing to the Earth? When a teacher at a private middle school throws himself to his death in front of his students, Pierre Hoffman (Laurent Lafitte) arrives as his replacement. He soon begins to notice odd behaviour amongst a central clique of six especially gifted students, and starts following them, learning that they head to an abandoned quarry every day after school, where they have hidden a collection of DVDs. Pierre finds the disks contain footage of industrial animal slaughter and food processing, intercut with images of nuclear conflagrations, apocalyptic biblical imagery, and warnings about the unsustainable future of humanity. Unnerved, Pierre comes to believe the clique are watching him, and may have been involved in the previous teacher's suicide. But is he correct, or is it paranoia? If you're looking for definitive answers here, you won't get them. Virtually none of the mysteries the film throws up are conclusively resolved. In theory, I don't have a problem with this. Films built around ambiguity, where certain details are withheld, and everything is left up to subjective interpretation, can work extremely well. However, the mysteries of L'Heure de la sortie are very different to those found in, say, David Lynch. Co-written by Marnier and Elise Griffon, the film tackles political and social themes infinitely more weighty than those typically found in Lynch (who tends to focus on psychological issues). But whereas the absence of any obvious directorial or authorial "statement" in Lynch's work is part of what makes it so successful, here, due to the various political themes raised, the question of "what is the director trying to say" remains front-and-centre. The narrative throws so much gasoline on the fire that it burns itself out. By roughly the half-way point, I had stopped caring why the teacher had killed himself, because there were about fifteen other unanswered questions rattling about. Which is not to say there is nothing to admire. The 1980s-style retro score by John Carpenter aficionados Zombie Zombie is excellent, and Romain Carcanade's cinematography is superb, using anamorphic lenses to distort interiors in tandem with Pierre's crumpling mental state, and really hammering home how monumentally hot it's supposed to be. There are also individual scenes of great brilliance. For all its unsettling weirdness and creepy kids, the most disturbing scene was one based entirely in reality. When an alarm sounds in the school, Pierre asks if it's a fire drill, and the class tell him it's an active shooter drill. The students calmly gather their things and move to the wall, sitting under the windows. However, when Pierre joins them, they chastise him, firstly, for leaving his own things on his desk, meaning if a shooter walks by, they will look in and know someone is in there; and secondly, he forgets to turn his phone onto airplane mode. The scene is chillingly effective in it profound mundanity, hammering home the very different lives that people of Pierre's age led when they were in school. Obviously, this speaks to the generation divide, but it also speaks to issues of desensitisation; the state of the world has sufficiently traumatised these children to the point where something like this is routine. All in all though, I was disappointed. It builds up nicely in the early stages, but about mid-way through the second act, it flounders, as you start to realise it's not actually building to anything specific. The characterisation is also poor, with only Pierre given any kind of arc, whilst the children themselves remain empty avatars. I'm also not entirely convinced that if you want to prod people into action vis-a-vis climate change, the best way to go about it is by presenting a mystery-thriller that has no intentions of explaining what is going on - the vehicle just doesn't seem to correlate with the message. See more

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School's Out

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