La Maternelle (1933)
Directed by Jean Benoît-Lévy, Marie Epstein

Film Review

Coincidentally, 1933 saw the release of two very different films which provided a scathing indictment of the French education system.  Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite (1933) is the more interesting and most overtly critical of the two films, but it had little chance to make an impact because it was banned immediately after its premiere through fears that it might lead to an outbreak of violence in schools. Jean Benoît-Lévy's La Maternelle (a.k.a. Children of Montmartre), released a few months later, was less controversial because it framed its criticism within the constructs of a popular melodrama but it argues the case for drastic reforms as eloquently as Vigo's film, by showing that compassion and understanding are as important to a child's education as rote learning and discipline.

Benoît-Lévy's film was the second - and easily the best - of three adaptations of the 1904 novel of the same title by Léon Frapié, which was awarded France's highest literary accolade, the Prix Concourt.  Previously, there had been a silent version by Gaston Roudès, released in 1925, and Henri Diamant-Berger directed a third version in 1949.  Benoît-Lévy shares the directing and writing credits with Marie Epstein (brother and frequent collaborator of the avant-garde cineaste Jean Epstein), as they did on a number of films.  Benoît-Lévy was not only a productive and very capable filmmaker, he was also a committed pedagogue and made over three hundred short films with an educational and public health remit.  His interest in education and the well-being of children is evident throughout La Maternelle, which is his most involving and humane film, the one for which he is remembered.

Whilst structurally it resembles a fairly conventional melodrama, La Maternelle has several characteristics that mark it out as a modern and subtly subversive film for its time.  The camera moves far more freely than in most early sound films and this gives the film an energy and fluidity that stresses the boisterous activity in the classroom.  At no point does the film feel cold and static - there is a constant impression of movement, either physical motion or emotional development. More importantly, La Maternelle is one of the earliest films to be centred around the psychology of the child.  Much of the film shows us the world from a child's perspective, and the only adult character who seems capable of engaging with children is a child-like Madeleine Renaud, whose subdued performance is one of breathtaking humanity.

All of the other adults are seen as grotesques or caricatures - the more senior attendant Madame Paulin (played by superb Mady Berry) who delights in roasting the mice she catches; the school principal (a delightfully fastidious Alice Tissot) who thinks it a cardinal sin that a cleaning woman should have a college education; a visiting professor who intends to force-feed the children the rabbit they have just befriended; and the feared Dr Libois, who ends up inflicting the cruellest blow of all by stealing Rose for himself.  Notice how large close-ups are used throughout the film to reveal to us the children's emotional states whilst also emphasising how they regard the adults - Rose is seen as a ministering angel, the others as cruel and stupid ogres.  As in Vigo's film, La Maternelle forces us to see the world through a child's eyes.

Marie Coeuret is the child character we most identify with - she soon becomes the emotional heart of the film and the primary plot driver.  The film's authors - assisted by an astonishingly true to life performance from a debutante Paulette Élambert - compel us to see into Marie's soul and sympathise with her as one calamity after another befalls her, leading ultimately to her suicide attempt at the film's dramatic climax.  Her contempt for her mother when she allows a stranger to chat her up in a bar is as obvious as her desperate need for affection, and when Rose enters her life, offering the kind of love she has never known, we know that she is setting herself up for an even greater fall.  She becomes instantly jealous of any affection that Rose offers the other children, and in the exquisitely poignant scenes where Libois first proposes to Rose and then is seen walking with her by the river the pain in Marie's heart is writ large on her face.  La Maternelle's obvious sentimentality has a cruel edge to it that makes it a highly effective piece of social commentary.  There was probably no other film made in the 1930s that offers so powerful an insight into the emotional needs of the child as this remarkable but now sadly overlooked film.

Film Synopsis

After her father's bankruptcy Rose, an educated woman in her early twenties, is abandoned by her fiancé and is forced to fall back on her own resources.  She ends up taking a job as an attendant in a Montmartre nursery school which caters for 150 children of the area's working poor.  She soon gains the confidence of the children and develops a particular fondness for a little girl named Marie.  When Marie's prostitute mother goes off with a man, Rose allows the girl to stay with her, to the disapproval of the school's stern supervisor.  The latter finds she has an excuse to dispense with Rose's services when it emerges that she has a college degree and is therefore unfit to be a lowly school attendant.  Dr Libois, the school's inspector and physician, is so moved by Rose's compassion for the children that he asks for her hand in marriage.  Realising that she is about to lose her one true friend, Marie is devastated and decides to kill herself...