Les Fautes d’orthographe (2004) - film review

France, 1967.  Aged 15, Daniel Massu decides that he should be treated like any other boy at the boarding school run by his parents.  However, life in a shared dormitory proves to be harder than he imagined.  Bullied by his classmates, he begins to resent his parents’ coolness towards him.  Things come to a head when one of the few friends he makes is expelled from the school.  Daniel contrives a scheme to get even with his tyrannical father…

In his previous two films (Tout le monde n’a pas la chance d’avoir des parents communistes and L’homme est une femme comme les autres), director Jean-Jacques Zilbermann has shown a flair for tackling social realist themes with genuine interest and a wry sense of humour.  He continues this trend with hid third film, Les Fautes d’orthographe, a semi-autobiographical account of his uncomfortable years in a French boarding school.

Although the film is generally well-scripted and well-acted, there is the impression that Zilbermann is playing with too many ideas, trying to cram too much into too small a space.  Indeed, this feels rather like two films badly spliced together.  The first half is a latter day version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, in which the pampered adolescent Daniel undergoes all manner of psychological angst as he finds himself rejected by his peers and his parents whilst coping with the trauma of his first sexual experiences.  Whilst Zilbermann is by no means the first filmmaker to tackle these themes, he does so with great sensitivity and insight, and paints a picture of life in a boarding school that is gruellingly tough and unsentimental, vaguely reminiscent of Ken Loach’s 1969 masterpiece Kes.

In its second half, the film becomes a slightly laboured allegory of the May 1968 uprising, with Daniel single-handedly engineering a rebellion against his parents’ tyrannous regime.  Although it’s all pretty well-realised, it just doesn’t quite ring true, and the realism that Zilbermann is striving for is frequently undermined by over-dramatization and some unconvincing characterisation.  That the director manages to get away with these faults is down largely to the contributions from his excellent cast.  In particular, Carole Bouquet and Olivier Gourmet make their thinly drawn, somewhat caricatured, characters plausible and interesting, whilst Damien Jouillerot’s portrayal of the angst-ridden Daniel is striking in its maturity and acute sense of realism.

© James Travers 2007

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?