Sometimes cinema is at its most potent and engrossing when it’s stripped right down to the necessities. Playground, the completed, uncomfortably highly effective first characteristic from the Belgian writer-director Laura Wandel, is a lean 72 minutes in size, with no rating and a lithe, instinctive, handheld digital camera that not often leaves the face of seven-year-old Nora (Maya Vanderbeque, excellent). It’s piercingly insightful with out ever labouring the purpose.
The movie Nora’s well-meaning try to intervene when she sees her older brother Abel (Günter Duret) focused, exploring the way in which that bullying spreads like a stain by way of a main and center college group; how the taint of victimhood can override the bonds of friendship and household; and the way doing the appropriate factor can backfire catastrophically.
Playground’s French title, Un monde, interprets as “a world”, and the varsity is simply that: the squat, blocky buildings and treacherous strip of asphalt are a hostile and inescapable atmosphere. There isn’t any respite – both for the viewers or for the youngsters who discover themselves outcasts within the semi-feral pack dynamic of childhood.
Frédéric Noirhomme’s digital camera is just about a personality within the story. It hovers at youngsters’s eye stage, nervy in an unforgiving bluish, bruised color palette, solely sometimes permitting an grownup to slide absolutely into focus. A sympathetic trainer (Laura Verlinden) is one; Nora and Abel’s father and, we assume, principal carer (Karim Leklou) is one other. However equally spectacular is the sound: with the digital camera locked on Nora’s tearful saucer eyes, a lot of the stress is created, vividly, exterior the body. It’s a outstanding achievement.
