Although it seems like there’s a pronounced surplus of closely observed docs set in European junior schools, Claire Simon’s Elementary, which premiered last week as a Cannes Special Screening, does distinguish itself and is often a beautiful experience. With the French filmmaker’s prolific work rate, festival audiences and cinephiles are gaining a gradual sense of what she’s truly interested in, and how each new film presents an original and intellectually provocative take on its subject matter. Yet she’s become more internationally renowned only recently, and prospective viewers might not be aware that she’s investigated school settings before, in 1993’s mid-length Récréations and 2018’s Young Solitude [+lee también:
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Set at the Makarenko Public Elementary School in Ivry-sur-Seine, located just outside metropolitan Paris, Elementary deftly focuses on both the means and the techniques of education, and the responses of the student body. It’s a deeply organic-feeling film, taking the seasoned, adult viewer through activities that might initially seem, well, overly elementary, but do re-sensitise you to how formative those first years of school education are.

Taking place at a public school where the kids are largely from immigrant backgrounds, a more cynical film might foreground anti-social behaviour and unsuccessful attempts at learning, familiar from fiction works like The Class [+lee también:
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As the running time proceeds, oddly yet intuitively structured around a putative school day first, followed by auxiliary activities in the final third, the film’s interest in matters of ethnicity and religion starts to show. It isn’t blunt enough to suggest that the school is a microcosm of wider issues in France today, or a preview of its future, but the Middle Eastern and African identities of the children are made a subject. Simon nervily evades completely positive representations by first showing one young boy being disciplined for pushing other kids in the playground; another gets a vignette all to himself as he struggles with language prompts from the teacher. Later, a discussion of prayer custom and belief finds the children at their most opinionated, comparing with and lightly chiding the others on their levels of religious observance, all showing the first stirrings of a more adult self-awareness. Near its conclusion, students from a wealthier school are bussed in to demonstrate a classical music performance, as Makarenko’s kids attempt to play along at their beginner or just absent musical level, and the results intriguingly sound like true-blue avant-garde music.

Like the majority of Simon’s films, it’s this existential edge, and the feeling of merely observing and witnessing, with only delicate editorialising, that strongly marks Elementary. We don’t leave the film – played out by the leaving cohort of older kids singing Rihanna’s iconic “Diamonds” – having digested a thesis, in a pedagogic way that might mirror the learning undertaken at the school. Everything is transparently laid out, and captured in all its discomfort and humanity, creating a spacious realm for our own thoughts to bloom.

Elementary is a production by France, staged by Les Films Hatari, Madison Films and Iwaso Films. Its world sales are managed by Films Boutique.