Play­ground

The pres­ence of chil­dren on screen is a pre­car­i­ous thing. Film­mak­ers take a great risk when deal­ing with kids, invit­ing the poten­tial for sac­cha­rine pre­co­cious­ness or mud­dled inex­pe­ri­ence that could serve to derail the entire work. Yet, as is the case with Lau­ra Wandel’s fea­ture debut Play­ground, some films are impres­sive­ly bol­stered by the work of its young per­form­ers who bring a fear­less sense of authen­tic­i­ty to this sto­ry about their lives and experiences.

With its low cam­era angles and claus­tro­pho­bic close-ups, Wandel’s film is the cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of an adult bend­ing down to meet a child at eye lev­el: to enter their world on equal foot­ing. We expe­ri­ence the first day back at school for sib­lings Nora (Maya Van­der­beque) and Abel (Günter Duret) through their per­spec­tive while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly reliv­ing the hor­rors of our own.

And hor­ror it is as old­er broth­er Abel is imme­di­ate­ly picked on by a group of boys while Nora strug­gles to fit in with the oth­er girls in her class, two sit­u­a­tions that leave a queasy feel­ing in the stom­ach as you con­sid­er all the ways these expe­ri­ences cause harm.

When Nora wit­ness­es Abel being bul­lied, her instinct, despite her younger age, is to pro­tect him. As expect­ed, telling her father only makes things worse for Abel whose tor­men­tors redou­ble their efforts. ​“It’s good you told me,” her father tells her, but this doesn’t align with the bru­tal pol­i­tics of the play­ground that Nora is only just begin­ning to understand.

Across its bold­ly suc­cinct sub 80-minute run­time, Play­ground fol­lows Nora as she nav­i­gates her posi­tion at the school with the help of a kind teacher whole Abel’s rela­tion­ship to his bul­lies takes a strange turn. But it’s a heav­i­ly stylised film, with its direct cam­era tech­niques and a com­pact­ness that leaves it ulti­mate­ly feel­ing suf­fo­cat­ing, offer­ing lit­tle sense of release over the course of this mod­est arc.

This is effec­tive as a sto­ry­telling oppor­tu­ni­ty, yes, but it’s also a device that is used to its extent with­in the first few min­utes of the film. There is nowhere new for it to go in its con­struc­tion or nar­ra­tive, and the film only fur­ther plumbs the depths of mis­ery for these poor kids. Its poten­cy wears off quick­ly and the rest of the film los­es its effi­ca­cy as a result. Wan­del dis­plays her clear skill as a direc­tor of actors in this exer­cise, but there is the sense that this could have been a painful­ly vis­cer­al short film instead of elon­gat­ed into a fea­ture where it begins to feel overdone.

Van­der­beque and Duret are both dev­as­tat­ing­ly con­vinc­ing – almost too con­vinc­ing to han­dle con­sid­er­ing the trau­ma fac­tor of the nar­ra­tive. This is not a joy­ful film in any way, reflect­ing just how hor­ri­ble chil­dren can be to one anoth­er and how gru­elling the process of belong­ing in social envi­ron­ments can be. It offers an astute com­men­tary, too, on the dif­fer­ent ways we under­stand the world as chil­dren and as adults, and how our abil­i­ty to con­form to dan­ger­ous norms begins at an ear­ly age.

As a debut fea­ture, Play­ground is a mark of the tal­ent to come from Wan­del whose poten­tial shines through even if the nar­row frame­work and for­mal con­straints of the film are not the most inspiring.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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