Entertainment

Montreal school drama unfolds with class

Picture a reverse “Dead Poets Society”: This time it’s a traditional teacher named Monsieur Lazhar who gets caught in the jaws of modernity.

This beautifully restrained French-Canadian production, set in Montreal, was this year a deserving Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. Its title character, a political- asylum seeker from Algeria, has a complicated relationship with modernity. Back home, medieval-style tribal hatreds resulted in the death of his wife. Yet at his new job, where a hug is considered out of bounds and a poignant confession of feelings is labeled “violent,” he starts to seem an oddly reactionary figure.

Filling in at a middle school where a teacher hanged herself in his classroom, M. Lazhar (played by the actor-writer-comedian Mohamed Fellag) is bewildered by its customs. Habits that come naturally to him — he slaps a student, mildly, for being naughty — are totally forbidden, and even traditional grammar terms have been replaced by a newfangled blather. His outsider status comes across in a wordless image when, sitting in a courtroom for a hearing, he notices on the wall signs using symbols with lines through them forbidding usage of cellphones — and eating. The look on his face says: Who would eat during a court hearing?

Lazhar is also one of only three men working in the school (the other two are a gym teacher and a custodian), and this “feminocracy,” as one of the men calls it, has taken on absurd dimensions following the suicide. Boys are banned from an innocent game of king-of-the-mountain on a heap of snow at recess, and when a student delivers an address on her late teacher, the principal bans it from further distribution. Reading a passage from Balzac earns Lazhar a mild rebuke for being too stuffy. Going a bit deeper, it turns out that before the suicidal teacher’s death, she too had felt roughed up by the PC standards of the school.

The problems of both pedagogy and culture addressed in “Monsieur Lazhar” are troubling, consequential and seldom covered in cinema, and the story works in its themes so quietly and artfully that a hug registers as a genuinely defiant gesture. Like a dedicated teacher, this is a film that stays with you.