‘The Competition’ Review: Vying for a Slot in an Elite Film School

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/movies/the-competition-review.html

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La Fémis is an unusual film school: The establishment, in Paris, has no professors and no classes as such. Instead, students work with a variety of French film professionals in specific disciplines to learn by doing. Thousands of students apply every year.

Claire Simon’s documentary “The Competition” shows the process by which 40 students, the limit in the term depicted here, are accepted to La Fémis — which is an acronym for the Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de L’image et du Son (the European Foundation for the Image and Sound Professions).

If you think you might be allergic to a film about a film school, I’ll level with you: This contains enough of the expected (for instance, a near-parade of young white would-be directors explicating their visions) that you wouldn’t be entirely wrong to give this a pass. But “The Competition,” after showing the process of submitting applications and sitting in assemblies (Simon risks replicating the tedium she’s portraying here) is in many ways juicy well beyond one’s expectations.

I teach film, and this movie gave me some bracing lessons. I gasped at the way some of the admissions examiners slouched in front of applicants. (Resolved: Be more vigilant about posture in class.) And I almost gagged when another examiner remarked to colleagues, with contemptuous levity, that her group’s admissions ought to include “an Asian, a black and an Arab.”

Almost comedic is a sequence near the end where a large panel of examiners argue over which (if any) applicants are trying to put one over on them. France invented deconstruction, I know, but the discourse here, in the pursuit of bad faith that I didn’t see in any of the would-be students we’ve seen interview, goes above and beyond reason.

Writing about this film when it was shown under a different English title, the critic Richard Brody has averred it shows why innovation in French film has (by his lights) all but dried up. The movie’s most provocative aspect is its near-methodical portrayal of hive-mind thinking pursued as a kind of norm — not just by the examiners, but the hopeful applicants.