The treatment of death in the film ‘Monsieur Lazhar.’
The main theme in ‘Monsieur Lazhar’, a film directed by Philippe Falardeau, is death. This film is a dramatic comedy that takes place in a primary school in Canada where a teacher has committed suicide, and is then replaced by ‘Monsieur Bachir Lazhar’, an Algerian immigrant seeking asylum, after having left his home country due to threats to his family, that was later killed in a fire. The film thus shows the different impacts that death can have on people, especially the children. This review will further analyse these impacts, and how death is being treated by others.
The film starts with its most significant scene, on which the rest of the film’s events are based, as they are a direct result of what happens in this scene: the discovery of the teacher’s body, named Martine Lachance. We start the scene with watching children play in the school’s courtyard, before lessons start, and among them, we focus on a little girl named Alice, whom we can consider to be the main character, other than Monsieur Lazhar. Alice stands alone, watching the other children play, when her friend and classmate Simon joins her. She reminds him that it is his turn to go and get the milk for the entire class, and he runs off to do it, but he finds the door to his classroom locked, and can see the body of his teacher. He is the first person to discover her. The school staff tries to keep the other children away, so they won’t see Martine, but Alice manages to detach herself form her group and spots her. We end the scene by watching Alice realise just what she is looking at. Not only does this scene start off our story but is also an example of circular narrative. We start the film with Alice and end the scene with her, and in addition, we finish the film with a shot of her hugging Monsieur Lazhar goodbye.
Lazhar becomes their new teacher, and tries to help his class with their grief, a feeling we later find out he is familiar with. His family’s death was no accident, his wife, also a teacher, had written a controversial book criticising the Algerian government and since then they were targeted with threats, and killed before they could leave the country. Lazhar hears what happened in the school and begs the headteacher to let him teach the class. He’s never been a teacher, but he knows what the children are going through and believes he can help them. He often faces discrimination due to where he comes from, such as being told by a student’s parents that their child isn’t misbehaving, he just doesn’t understand her behaviour and their culture. We also see during the process to be granted the status of a refuge that his family’s death is treated as if it doesn’t matter, and it is even suggested that it was an accident. The way it is brushed off reminds us how Martine’s death was brushed off. The children have a class psychologist, who after a few one-hour sessions decides that they don’t need them anymore. Martine’s classroom is painted, all of her things removed immediately, and every time Lazhar tries talking about what happened he is told off, which bring sus to the next crucial scene in the film: Alice’s speech.
The class is told to write an essay on the theme of violence, and Alice writes hers on the school and Martine. How she and her mother used to believe her school was beautiful because it had good teacher, it was in a good district… and yet it is the same school where her teacher decided to kill herself. Lazhar reads this essay to the headteacher, claiming he found it inspiring and wants it to be distributed to the whole school to show the process of grieving, but he is shut down as she wants the school to forget what happened and move on, and says she found the essay too violent, despite violence being the main theme of the assignment. This scene can be considered to be central to what this review discusses as we see two different beliefs: The headteacher who wants to move on and appears to be indifferent, who thinks this is the best course of action as right now her students are dropping out and haunted by what happened and no other teacher wants to work there, and Lazhar, who believes that in order to heal you need to talk about your problems and even analyse them.
We never see Martine, but it is inferred that she is a lot like Lazhar. They were both different teachers, Martine loved her students, tried helping them outside of lessons and showed them affection, and Lazhar goes against his boss’ decision on how to deal with the suicide, so he can help his students. There’s also the little detail of their names: When Lazhar introduces himself to the class, he says his name means ‘good luck’. Martine’s last name is Lachance- La chance, meaning luck.
The film has a somewhat open ending. Nothing is truly resolved. Lazhar gets fired as he was never a teacher, but a restaurant owner, and is informed that he must leave quietly without saying goodbye to the children, and that his replacement has already been hired. He begs the headteacher to allow him to say goodbye to his class as they didn’t get to do that with Martine. His leaving mirrors how Martine ‘left’: on a random day, without saying goodbye, only to be immediately replaced by someone and never be spoken of again. The only difference is Alice who is there to see Lazhar go. The film ends as we see them hug, imitating the end of the opening scene, where Alice sees Martine’s body, and was the last one in the film to do so.