To Be and to Have

From the outset, Être et avoir (To Be and to Have) is caught between clichéd Republican imagery (the happy, egalitarian transmission of knowledge) and the ‘funny’ mawkish minutia of the children’s lives (the threat of a sickly-sweet fly-on-the-wall documentary). It is clear that this double pitfall, or risk, both interests Nicolas Philibert as a handicap to overcome and at the same time limits him. All the more so as he is probably not insensitive to the popular vignettes in his subject: the faces of schoolchildren reddened by the cold, the teacher’s beard, the awkwardness of the parents when talking about their offspring. Because in Philibert’s vision of the world, from Le Pays des sourds (In the Land of the Deaf) to La Moindre des choses (Every Little Thing), there is a genuine utopia of the community, bound together by secret ties, emotions that are all the stronger for being intangible and almost implicit, that he must grasp above and beyond the obvious. Even if these emotions have the slapstick humour of the already famous 4-year-old Jojo, with his paint-smeared face and pencils stuck up his nostrils. (Didier Péron; Libération)