Playground (2021)
Directed by Laura Wandel  

On my first day of kindergarten, my mother dressed me up in an ironed button-up white dress shirt and a red clip-on tie. It would be the first time that I can remember that I would be away from both my parents for more than a few hours. I was late to class and the kindergarten teacher instructed me to hang my fall jacket in the designated coatroom. It was a dimly lit room and as I struggled with the tricky zipper, a single teardrop streamed down my face. I wiped the moisture from my cheek with my tie, sighed heavily, and began the day.

Laura Wandel’s Playground conjures those types of memories. It’s a film about going to school for the first time and navigating the trenches. It’s about the callousness of children, the ugliness of doing anything outside of the normative. The film is centered on seven-year-old Nora (Maya Vanderbeque). She enters school knowing just her older brother Abel (Günter Duret). Desperate for any connection in a sea of humanity, she tries to hang out with him, only to be rejected and forced to make friends of her own. She quickly begins to observe that other boys are bullying Abel. Her feckless attempts to intervene only complicate matters, leaving Nora and Abel as outcasts within the rigid school social hierarchy. The overarching sense of anomie that pervades throughout the film will beckon comparisons to the Dardennes, but there’s a horror component to the film’s visual shallow focus that reminded me of war films like Elem Klimov’s Come and See and László Nemes’ Son of Saul. The result makes every day for Nora seem like the end of the world. And when you’re seven, the slightest embarrassment seems like a personal affront to your existence. Wandel gets that, and her debut film is an impressive catalogue and testament to the miracle that is surviving childhood.