Review: The Competition Patiently Looks Inside an Iconic Film School

Claire Simon’s The Competition follows the rigorous selection process for Paris’s iconic film and television school La Fémis, which every year accepts 60 new students, out of some 1,000 applicants. Throughout, Simon’s camera quietly observes the various phases of the selection process, aware that to best capture the anxiousness of a moment is to not embellish it. As a result, we come to take great pleasure in watching the most menial of tasks, such as a committee member counting numbers or checking boxes on a form.

The competition here progresses from an auditorium room with hundreds of young people writing an analytical essay on a film sequence for three hours into a complex tapestry of human interactions between cinema professionals who interview and run workshops with young candidates, and later deliberate. These professionals, who are both male and female and mostly white, seem profoundly invested in the process, as though they were hiring a crew to work on their personal projects. They are, in reality, helping shape French cinema for decades to come, and cinema history writ large. Alumi from La Fémis include Claire Denis, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Arnaud Desplechin, André Téchiné, and François Ozon.

While those responsible for the selection process keep things mostly courteous among themselves during deliberations, it’s precisely when conflict emerges around a candidate that we realize how gracious Simon is with her subjects. It would have been easy to play up the drama or drum up miserabilist tales around the high hopes of candidates and the frustrations that follow. Simon focuses instead on how candidates trying to make a case for themselves are often self-contradicting, and as such difficult to truly assess; the film is also about the impossibility of objective criteria when it comes to such matters. The truly awful performances are never shown, only referred to in passing after they happened. This isn’t some reality show that allows us to revel in schadenfreude or root for charismatic underdogs.

This is curatorial practice of the highest order, too, on Simon’s part, and a meta one at that. Is this not what good cinema, the cinema that La Fémis’s most famous alumni have produced, is about? A cinema that refuses the imposition of meaning and facile interpretation? But Simon does pay a price for her commitment to little interference. In a sea of white professionals interviewing white would-be students, we keep waiting for the race question to emerge in The Competition. Not as the cynical aside by a panelist who says choosing one black, one Asian, and one Arabic student would make the administration happy, especially if the students are poor, but some kind of subtle editorial underscoring of the absence of anything that isn’t bourgeois—a formatting too naturalized for most in the film to see.

When we finally see a black candidate from the Ivory Coast, the daughter of political refugees, recounting her precarious background to two committee members, she’s unable to name the title of a single film that she likes. She thinks and thinks, and the camera lingers, very much consistent with its behavior up to that point—a dynamic that seems to work against the candidate, whose prolonged silence turns her into a humiliated object. In an act of either courage or cluelessness, she says that she can’t even remember the last time she went to the movies. Were she one of the many comely bourgeois French boys that seem to win over the interviewers for no logical reason, her unvarnished spontaneity may have been forgiven as a cute moment of panic. Instead, the women interviewing the girl are horrified that that she can’t come up with the title of a film (not even Titanic), and as they move on to the next task at hand, it’s as if the girl’s history of violence, and fearlessness, counts for nothing.