Interesting but rather weak political allegory about the individual’s relationship to the collective. The most telling aspect of this whole affair is the relentlessly-anal character of the institutional schooling shown here. While this anality is fundamental to any understanding of collectivism, it lacks breadth and depth since endless shots of identically dressed children being poorly toilet-trained soon become tiresome.
Where this movie scores highly is in the high cuteness factor of the children involved and their complete naturalness in front of the camera. It gets children just right as to how they are and reminds us how surreal young minds can be in their thought processes. The sad-faced rebel - unable and unwilling to obey school rules – is a template for the political rebellions of adulthood. But his character fails to make this the If… or the Zero de Conduite it could so easily have been, because the rebellion here is rather more formalistic than truly meaningful. Moreover, the adults here come across as much more uniform than individual.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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