Être et avoir (To be and to have) is a French documentary that tracks the life of a school teacher, Georges Lopez, and his class of 12 children between 4 and 12 or 13 years of age, studying in a one-classroom school. The film is a portrait in ordinariness of life in an unnamed French village, but it is a portrait in the extraordinariness of the all-encompassing process of education and individual growth and change.
The film is not given to emotion. It is not really a traditional film, with a story line, a well-defined beginning. The sweetness, I speak of is best represented at the end of the film as the students bid good-bye to their teacher and in a world, where a teacher can no longer touch a student without inviting awful aspersions, it was nice to see so many kisses being exchanged.
Above all, Être et avoir offers one the luxury of a journey down memory lane, at least for those, who attended idyllic, old fashioned, prep schools with small class sizes, where the teacher truly made a significant contribution to how we turned out. I don’t know about you but slice-of-life appeals to me. And Être et avoir did very well on that count. A well-spent afternoon! The movie can be found on Netflex.
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