Ça Commence Aujourd’hui
It All Starts Today movie storyline. Daniel is schoolmaster of a kindergarten in a small French town. The local economy, which depended entirely on coal production, has been mired in a depression ever since the mines were closed. When their parents fall into utter discouragement or even poverty because of prolonged unemployment, the children suffer the consequences.
Daniel is confronted daily with difficult situations and he feels responsible to deal with them although they are outside the scope of his responsibilities. This is a frustrating task: politicians are concerned with tightening their budgets, bureaucrats in the intricate web of French social and educational services with their prerogatives, utility companies with getting their bills paid; teachers, social workers, and policemen are overwhelmed. Daniel’s relations with his parents, but also with Valeria, his fiancée, and her son are not entirely smooth either. He nevertheless soldiers on with the staff of the kindergarten, all doing their best to educate the children of a severely disrupted society.
It All Starts Today (French: Ça Commence Aujourd’hui) is a 1999 French drama film directed by Bertrand Tavernier and starring Philippe Torreton, Maria Pitarresi, Nadia Kaci, Véronique Ataly, Nathalie Bécue, Emmanuelle Bercot, Françoise Bette, Christine Citti, Christina Crevillén and Sylviane Goudal. It was entered into the 49th Berlin International Film Festival where it won an Honourable Mention.
Fils de mineur, Daniel Lefebvre est directeur d’une ecole maternelle a Hernaing, pres de Valenciennes. Il exerce son metier avec passion dans une region qui fut riche et qui maintenant est rongee par le chomage. Un soir, Mme Henry vient chercher tres tard sa fille Laetitia. En voulant l’embrasser, elle s’ecroule ivre morte. Prise de honte, elle s’enfuit abandonnant sa fille et son bebe. Daniel decide de raccompagner les enfants chez eux malgre le reglement qui interdit de telles initiatives. Cet incident l’amene a radicaliser son action et ses prises de position.
Film Review for It All Starts Today
From its plot, you’d think that Bertrand Tavernier’s It All Starts Today would be a chore. The tale of an elementary school headmaster’s struggle to obtain social services in a mining town blighted by economic disaster could have been the sort of well-intentioned but stultifying liberal social drama you feel obligated to endure once a year, just like a dental checkup.
That Tavernier has fashioned a light and modestly inspiring film from such dour material is a small miracle. It’s a model of politically engaged cinema, offering a clear-eyed view of a social problem without pretending to have any easy solutions.
Tavernier and his co-scenarists (Tiffany Tavernier and Dominique Sampiero) understand that everyday political struggle can be made dramatically compelling by focusing on the details. We get no grand statements of principle or sweeping revolutionary gestures. This is instead a film about incremental progress in the face of collapse, the sorts of tiny victories that serve mainly as a hedge against despair.
Philippe Torreton plays Daniel, a kindergarten teacher and the chief administrator of a financially strapped school. His students bear the brunt of the town’s 34% unemployment, coming to school hungry and sick. Some are neglected by parents overcome with depression; others are beaten.
Daniel is fiercely dedicated to his school. He takes it personally when overworked social workers fail to check up on his students and launches a battle against the city bureaucracy. Though he’s a gifted teacher (his classroom scenes are delightful) he’s a belligerent, ineffective leader, irritating all his potential allies.
Tavernier dodges the stodgy, moralizing piety that undermines most political films by stressing Daniel’s testiness. He’s so focused on the struggles at work that he’s unable to commit himself fully to Valeria (Maria Pitarresi), the woman he lives with. For all his skill with children, he has a terrible relationship with Valeria’s son Remi (Lambert Marchal) and it’s even worse with his father, an embittered and violent ex-miner. We see him at his best only in the classroom, where his empathy for his students overwhelms his bad temper.
While the scenes from Daniel’s family life help the film avoid sentimentality, they’re also a bit unrealized. The performances are excellent (Pitarresi’s scenes with Marchal are outstanding) but the characters aren’t given enough screen time to fully register. They’re too obviously devices, a means of helping us understand Daniel. The film is weakest when it deals with his parents. They are trotted out for a few perfunctory scenes designed to let us glimpse the dysfunction that drove Daniel to teaching. In a film that so resolutely avoids simplifying its politics, this sort of easy equation of childhood trauma to adult conviction seems awfully simplistic.
Poised between muckraking and poetic realism, It All Starts Today is, for all its faults, a remarkable film. Like the work it most resembles – Alain Tanner’s 1975 Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 – it leavens its despondent vision of France’s economic realities with hope. Both films turn on images of children caught up in the pleasure of learning. Never saccharine, these moments ground Tavernier’s political arguments. There’s none of the comfort that a Hollywood film’s blandly reassuring inspiration might provide. Instead, we leave the theater energized, having seen what’s really at stake in these struggles.
It All Starts Today (1999)
Directed by: Bertrand Tavernier
Starring: Philippe Torreton, Maria Pitarresi, Nadia Kaci, Véronique Ataly, Nathalie Bécue, Emmanuelle Bercot, Françoise Bette, Christine Citti, Christina Crevillén, Sylviane Goudal
Screenplay by: Dominique Sampiero, Bertrand Tavernier, Tiffany Tavernier
Cinematography by: Alain Choquart
Film Editing by: Sophie Brunet
Costume Design by: Marpessa Djian
Art Direction by: Thierry François
Music by: Louis Sclavis
Distributed by: Bac Films
Release Date: February 16, 1999 (Berlin), March 12, 1999 (France)
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