Primary navigation
It All Starts Today
France 1999
Reviewed by Kevin Jackson
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Hernaing, in northern France: a former mining town with 34 per cent unemployment. Daniel Lefebvre is an idealistic principal of an primary school and a would-be writer. He struggles to do his best for his young charges but is constantly thwarted by the incompetence or indifference of the regional authorities, the hostility of his superiors and the apathy or despair of the parents themselves. Escorting five-year-old Laetitia home after her drunken mother, Mme Henry, collapses in the schoolyard and runs off, Daniel finds their flat in a state of freezing squalor. His attempts to do something about this crisis and others have mixed results. With the help of children's nurse Samia, he effects some small improvements, but his tendency to rage at bureaucrats brings down on him a school inspection.
Meanwhile, his ex-miner father suffers a near-fatal stroke. The sullen son of his girlfriend Valéria helps some thugs break into the primary school to vandalise it. Valéria resents his apparent unwillingness to give her another child. Beset by problems, he momentarily neglects the Henry family, who have had all their benefits cut off. Mme Henry kills herself and her children with an overdose of Phenobarbital. The Henrys are given an elaborate funeral by the local authorities which Daniel refuses to attend. Instead, Valéria, Daniel and the schoolchildren organise a festival at the school. Daniel agrees to try for a child with Valéria. At his parent's house, his mother reads to his father from a manuscript Daniel's written, a poetic tribute to the uncrushable spirit of their region's people.
Review
According to interviews Bertrand Tavernier has given to the French press, It All Starts Today all began with tales told by the fireside. The director was on holiday with his daughter Tiffany Tavernier, and listened with fascinated dismay to her new boyfriend Dominique Sampiero, the director of a primary school, as he described events from his working life. Sampiero told him about a mother from whom he was trying to collect a subscription of 30 francs (about £3), who couldn't pay because she had only 30 francs to last her for the rest of the month; about another young matron who turned up hours late to collect her child and then collapsed in the playground, dead drunk. It struck Tavernier, he says, that he hadn't seen too many stories of this kind in French cinema lately, and set about helping to fill the gap himself. He wrote It All Starts Today's screenplay in collaboration with Sampiero and Tiffany Tavernier (who have since married, so this film about troubled families is itself a family affair) and both those sad tales have made it into the final cut.
It's worth stressing the factual and personal origins of Tavernier's film to disarm, or at least qualify, some of the objections it will surely provoke in cynics and miserabilists on this side of the Channel. Not only is its hero a smouldering, macho-but-sensitive hunk (admirably played by Philippe Torreton, on his fourth outing with Tavernier after L.627, L'Appât and Capitaine Conan), he also moonlights as a lyric poet whose macho-but-sensitive aperçus blossom here and there in the soundtrack. Not only is his waitress girlfriend as beautiful as a French movie actress - as Maria Pitarresi, in fact - but she spends her own leisure hours with welding goggles and blow-torch, making avant-garde metal sculptures.
For a putatively serious-minded study of social deprivation, this artsy stuff looks several shades too glamorous; more unkindly, it looks silly. (I was not the only one who giggled at the first ominous sighting of sculpture.) Surely Tavernier is far too canny to believe audiences capable of responding enthusiastically to, say, Ken Loach's Raining Stones are still in need of such quaint narrative sweeteners? Does he think we can only sympathise with underclass characters if coaxed into the mood by a hero and heroine who are egregiously comely and artists to boot? Probably so: and in Tavernier's defence, it must be stressed that life can be as contrived as art, since Daniel's original, Sampiero, is indeed a poet, with a dozen slim volumes to his name who, judging by his photographs, scores fairly high himself on the macho-but-sensitive scale.
Yet to understand all is not always to forgive all, and even after one concedes that some of the more improbable elements of this film are faithful enough to reality, it continues to seem an uneasy marriage between social realism and soap. Although Tavernier has said, no doubt rightly, he couldn't have made a documentary on this material because the real-life families would have refused "from timidity or pride" to take part, a lot of the most memorable and telling passages in the film are its quieter moments shot in documentary or pseudo-documentary style. In the most haunting of these, an older colleague of Daniel's talks to an unseen interlocutor in standard news-gathering interview format, jump-cuts and all, about the frightening decline she has witnessed in her pupils' most elementary skills. Nowadays, "they don't even know how to talk."
There are other sequences which have something of this quality of unforced observation when Tavernier slackens his narrative reins and allows us the chance to ponder his widescreen images: the seasonal transformation of the northern French landscape from mid-winter starkness to summer lushness (a plain but adequately tactful parallel to the emotional expansion taking place in Daniel, who seems poised to father a child after all and maybe break through as a writer); the wretched domestic interiors with the odd quasi-genteel memento of more prosperous days, such as a useless barometer; the clumsy, faltering rhythms of children at their play-work; and Daniel coaxing them along with a generosity and fairness that is more impressive, more a work of art, than his rather overwrought scribblings. Had the whole film been made in this spirit, it might have been some species of masterpiece. But for all its virtues of heart and mind, It All Starts Today has the whiff of unduly conscious artifice, and is mainly
Credits
- Producers
- Alain Sarde
- Frédéric Bourboulon
- Screenplay
- Dominique Sampiero
- Tiffany Tavernier
- Bertrand Tavernier
- Director of Photography
- Alain Choquart
- Editor
- Sophie Brunet
- Art Director
- Thierry François
- Music
- Louis Sclavis
- ©Les Films Alain Sarde/Little Bear/TF1 Films Production
- Production Companies
- Alain Sarde & Frédéric Bourboulon present a co-production of Les Films Alain Sarde/Little Bear/TF1 Films Production with the participation of Canal+/CRRAV/sofica Studio Images 5
- Made with the support of La Région Nord Pas-de-Calais
- Production Supervisor
- Sylvie Chevereau-Marchais
- Production Co-ordinator
- Agnès Le Pont
- Production Manager
- François Hamel
- Unit Production Manager
- Benoît Charrié
- Unit Manager
- Henry Le Turc
- Location Manager
- Denis Bourgier
- Post-production Supervisor
- Florence Dard
- Assistant Directors
- Tiffany Tavernier
- Pierre Abela
- Fanny Etienne
- Sylvie Confolent
- Script Supervisor
- Zoé Zurstrassen
- Set Decorator
- José Moréno
- Sculptures
- Michel Karpowicz
- Costume Designer
- Marpessa Dijan
- Wardrobe
- Valérie Le Hello
- Make-up
- Agnès Tassel
- Hairdresser
- Beya Gasmi
- Titles/Opticals
- Marchetti
- Music Performed by
- Clarinets/Saxophones:
- Louis Sclavis
- Piano:
- François Raulin
- Double Bass:
- Bruno Chevillon
- Trombone:
- Yves Robert
- Trumpet/Bugle:
- Jean-François Canape
- Accordion:
- Jean-Louis Matinier
- Violoncello:
- Vincent Courtois
- Drums:
- Christophe Marguet
- Orchestra:
- l'Harmonie Municipale d'Anzin
- Leader:
- Jean Pepeck
- Music Arrangers
- François Raulin
- Louis Sclavis
- Sound Engineer
- Didier Lizé
- Soundtrack
- "Un portrait de Norman Rockwell" by Eddy Mitchell, Pierre Papadiamandis, performed by Eddy Mitchell; "It Ain't Right" by Walter Jacobs, performed by Lucky Peterson
- Sound
- Michel Desrois
- Gérard Lamps
- Associate Sound Mixer
- Eric Tisserand
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Elisabeth Paquotte
- ProTools Sound Editor
- Christian Riffard
- Sound Effects
- Laurent Lévy
- Cast
- Philippe Torreton
- Daniel Lefebvre
- Maria Pitarresi
- Valéria
- Nadia Kaci
- Samia Damouni
- Véronique Ataly
- Madame Liénard
- Nathalie Bécue
- Cathy
- Emmanuelle Bercot
- Madame Tiévaux
- Françoise Bette
- Madame Delacourt
- Christine Citti
- Madame Baudoin
- Christina Crevillen
- Sophie
- Sylviane Goudal
- Gloria
- Didier Bezace
- the inspector
- Betty Teboulle
- Madame Henry
- Gérard Giroudon
- the mayor
- Marief Guittier
- Daniel's mother
- Daniel Delabesse
- Marc
- Jean-Claude Frissung
- director's colleague
- Thierry Gibault
- police detecive
- Philippe Meyer
- municipal official
- Gérald Cesbron
- Monsieur Henry
- Michelle Goddet
- mother of abused child
- Stefan Elbaum
- abused child's uncle
- Nathalie Desprez
- Madame Bry
- Françoise Miquelis
- Madame Duhem
- Frédéric Richard
- Monsieur Bacheux
- Johanne Cornil-Leconte
- Madame Bacheux
- Sylvie Delbauffe
- woman with baby
- Lambert Marchal
- Rémi
- Kelly Mercier
- Laetitia
- Mathieu Lenne
- Jimmy
- Rémi Henneuse
- Kevin
- Corinne Agthe
- Madame Paquotte
- Dominique Bouchard
- doctor for 4-year-old check-up
- Benoît Constant
- Daniel's father
- Patrick Corteix
- Madame Henry's neighbour
- Véronique Dargent
- Madame Loiseau
- Valérie Dermagne
- the nurse
- Lilyane Discret
- young mother
- Leila Duhem
- Madame Polliaert
- Yamina Duvivier
- Madame Chimot
- Severine Fernand
- Angeline's mother
- Catherine Gorosz
- Madame Daumise
- Christophe Guichet
- Daniel's brother
- Nadia Ikisse
- Madame Mimouni
- Marie-Madeleine Langlois
- neighbour lady
- Nelly Larachiche
- Madame Legrand
- France Leroy
- café owner
- Claude Lienard
- Madame Henry's doctor
- Marcelle Loutre
- Guegdan's mother
- Jacky Meunier
- Valeria's father
- Cécile Montagnon
- Madame Lamart
- Michèle Niewrzeda
- Madame Bornat
- Vincenza Orologio
- Valeria's mother
- Marie-Françoise Prette
- Madame Marchal
- Linda Prudhomme
- Madame Dupuis
- Monique Quivy
- dinnerlady
- Claude Ronnaux
- colleague
- Françoise Sage
- Madame Mériaux
- Pascale Verdière
- wet nurse
- and the children of "Derrière les Haies" nursery school at Anzin
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Artificial Eye Film Company
- 10,654 feet
- 118 minutes 23 seconds
- Digital DTS sound
- In Colour
- Anamorphic
- Subtitles