"Être et avoir" / "To Be and To Have"

Earlier this month I wrote about The Class, a French film about an ethnically diverse high school classroom in Paris. I mentioned I'd heard something about a French film about its education system, which led me to check out The Class The film I was really thinking about was Être et avoir (To Be and To Have), a documentary about a one-room school house in rural France.

Having clarified that, I got a chance to watch the film, which is, in fact, a documentary. What a lovely piece. While The Class feels like a journalistic observation of the simmering tensions between teachers and students and between students of different nationalities, To Be and To Have comes across as a meditation on schoolhouse life from another time.

It was filmed in 2002, but could have been done years before then. There are no computers to be seen or really any other forms of modern-day instructional technology. The students use nothing more than paper, marker, pencils and crayons. For recess, they simply get the school's back lawn. Their lessons range from the usual grammar to learning how to make crepes.

The teacher, Georges Lopez, speaks in kind, measured tones, never raising his voice to his dozen or so pupils, who range in age from four to 12. You get glimpses of the students' home life, which typically involve farm animals, which leads you to understand that farming is most likely in their future.

Lopez's persona is so understated but he remains a driving force throughout the quiet movie, which I found myself greatly enjoying. About the most exciting thing that happens throughout the course of the movie are schoolyard spats and adorable mischief from the class scamp, little JoJo (the little boy in the movie poster). But the teacher's choices and teaching manner are hypnotic -- from the way he counsels feuding classmates on the importance of peaceful co-existence to an encouraging chat he has with a shy pre-teen girl uncertain about leaving behind the safety of the classroom for middle school.

It's all pretty amazing and I'm not ashamed to admit the final scene left me choked up. (I'd include a trailer here but the ones I could fine lacked subtitles.) I rarely watch documentaries because they tend to bore me but something about this one left me moved, introspective and nostalgic all at the same time. We all wish we had teachers like Monsier Lopez.