Playground Review: A Visceral and Unvarnished Look at School Power Dynamics

Playground is practically an exercise in the use of off-camera space, and a masterful and refreshingly consistent one at that.

Playground
Photo: Dragon Films

Writer-director Laura Wandel’s Playground opens with a close-up of seven-year-old Nora’s (Maya Vanderbeque) tearful, terrified face as her father (Karim Leklou) drops her off at school. Hers is the kind of indelible expression that only a child can make, similar to the one that Matvey Novikov’s character wears in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless when he overhears his divorced parents discussing plans to send him to a boarding school. It’s the face of a child feeling abandoned, discarded, unloved. And as we soon discover, Nora’s tears are preemptive—the agony of someone who senses she’s entering an unsafe space.

Wandel’s camera all but refuses to show us the adults in her film, as if not to dignify their presence. Instead, it latches on to Nora’s little face throughout, and with a depth of field that’s as eerily shallow as that of László Nemes’s Son of Saul. Playground is practically an exercise in the use of off-camera space, and a masterful and refreshingly consistent one at that. We barely see anything other than Nora’s face, and a superb Vanderbeque brings a startling nuance to the way her character slowly registers the horrors of a world made unbearable by the relentless attacks that her older brother, Abel (Günter Duret), suffers at the hands of other schoolboys.

Thanks to Wandel’s radical refusals—for one, she never throws the presumed innocence of children into a predictable light—the film is able to steer clear of mawkishness. Rather than a linear, conventional plot, we get a series of situations, or sketches, that repeat themselves: Children hurt children, Nora is horrified and tries to take action, and the adults dismiss her.

Advertisement

In one sequence, Nora catches Abel’s bullies dunking his head into a toilet and tries to get help. But the adults in Playground are never really available. They barely see Nora, as they’re overwhelmed by the brutality of other children who are hitting one another in the schoolyard. She goes back to the bathroom to find Abel sitting on the floor staring at the wall, soaked in water. She hugs him tight and asks, “Why do they do this?” He answers, “I don’t know.”

By the time an adult does intervene, it’s only to tell Abel off for being wet. Nora wants to blow the whistle and help Abel, but accepting help would mean admitting that he is powerless. Heavier than the burden of being bullied, it would seem, is the shame of admitting that you are. Which is why Abel asks Nora to not tell anybody, but she can’t bear the secret and tells their father. Abel feels betrayed and suddenly sibling love turns into resentment as Nora starts being bullied herself for being the sister of the school’s laughing stock.

Playground is an unvarnished contemplation of the cruelty of children and the negligence of adults. In that sense, the film is a sort of cinematic rendition of Peter Handke’s book Kindergeschichte, in which the author reflects on his child at play and realizes how close children are to gangsters, how committed they are to injustice both in the heat of the moment and in the most deliberate fashion. Except that Handke’s story is told from the point of view of a thoughtful adult observing how much children enjoy taking on the role of the hangman under the adults’ watch and, on some level, how much adults enjoy watching their own cruelty materialize in their kids. Words, laughter, fists, plastic bags for suffocation—anything will do.

Advertisement

In Playground, the adults slip into either glib or powerless behavior depending on the suffering of some children and the perversity of others. Those in a higher position of power are the ones who are least aware of the dynamics that doom certain kids as opposed to others. And so it becomes inevitable that children end up mimicking the presumption that everyone is to blame—as though all children were equally wicked—and the border between bullies and victims get muddled. Performing violence becomes the go-to solution for keeping oneself from being the target of violence in the dog-eat-dog world of the school playground.

And yet, it’s precisely there, in that playground, that not just violence but love creeps up. In one of the final moments in the film, its most beautiful sequence, Nora saves her brother from committing an unspeakable act. Their wrestling turns into a sort of surrender in the most unanticipated of ways. There is no dialogue, as the frame only makes room for Nora’s face, capturing the very instance where desperation somehow turns into relief, her cheek burrowed on her brother’s back like a barnacle. One sibling lays their body on top of the other, having haphazardly found each other again, and they simply breathe.

Score: 
 Cast: Günter Duret, Lena Girard Voss, Karim Leklou, Thao Maerten, Maya Vanderbeque, Laura Verlinden  Director: Laura Wandel  Screenwriter: Laura Wandel  Running Time: 72 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Diego Semerene

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor of queer and transgender media at the University of Amsterdam.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.