Playground (Laura Wandel, 2021) (Patreon)

It comes as no surprise that the shadow of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne hangs heavily over contemporary Belgian cinema. Still, Laura Wandel's feature debut is an unnerving duplication of their essential style and thematic concerns. I am fairly certain that if Playground were screened with no director credits or advance information, most astute viewers would mistake it for a brand new Dardennes effort.

As you can imagine, this speaks to the quality, if not the originality, of Playground, whose original French title is the decidedly Dardennesque Un Monde. This world is indeed circumscribed and complete, running according to very particular rules that cannot really be contravened by outsides. Unfortunately, this is the world of grade school, the crisis at hand is some rather extreme bullying, and the outsiders are adults, whose involvement is regarded as a transgression of tribal demands, the same as when someone violates the "code of the street" by calling on the cops.

On her first day of school, Nora (Maya Vanderbeque) is crying and afraid. Her father (Karim Leklou) tries to reassure her, but it is her older brother Abel (Günter Duret) who provides the most effective support and solace. Before long, Maya is getting into the groove of school life, but discovers that Abel is being beaten up, and eventually worse, by a trio of slightly older hoodlums. When Maya alerts a teacher and confides in her father -- the exact advice that Maya no doubt learned from contemporary anti-bullying initiatives -- Abel is only further abused and humiliated.

Wandel does a remarkable job placing Maya in the extreme center of Playground, zeroing in on her in much the same manner that Dardennes films hew absolutely to their main character's perspective. Although we can frequently see the goings-on in Maya's environment right behind her, just out of focus, Wandel never veers away from Maya's limited but astute perspective. (As she remarks to her teacher, "when you help people, things get worse.") Although the trajectory of Playground is rather deterministic, Vanderbeque's performance conveys the fear, frustration, and betrayal provoked by her impossible situation. Wandel even manages to shade this realistically depicted scenario with the flashes of Christian allegory so beloved of the Dardennes. 

So overall, there is nothing wrong with Playground, and its certainly easy to see why FIPRESCI gave it their Un Certain Regard prize. Inasmuch as any of us can predict the future nowadays, it will almost certainly play arthouses around the world next year. Still, it's hard to give an A to an assignment that smacks of such blithe plagiarism. Did she think we wouldn't notice?