2023-08-09 14:56:40
Carried by convincing characters, the film details the fight of a brilliant student to get out of her condition.
Equal opportunities, meritocracy, “respect for authority and fundamental knowledge” (in the words of the new Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal, when he took office), the sanctuary school of the Republic… We could decline in series all the notions that gravitate around the objectively coercive principle of compulsory schooling which is imperceptibly transmuted into a principle of social Darwinism when, at the end of the baccalaureate and in the opacity of the machine Parcoursup, more or less long and brilliant higher education, redistribute students on scales of professional success that are statistically more and more predictable. The emergence of the figure of the “class defector”, the minority of individuals having managed by their own resources to integrate the decision-making bourgeoisie, was carried by an often painful or dolorist vision of a condition of displaced person marked by complexes of origin impossible to erase.
Obstacle course
La Voie royale tells the detailed account of a school struggle to leave her condition: Sophie, daughter of indebted farmers, is strong in math and physics in high school. She integrates a hardcore preparation in a prestigious Lyon high school and aims for the Polytechnique competition. She then comes up against different processes of humiliation either for lack of a network, of knowledge of the codes, or because she does not trust herself enough in her ambition and unconsciously limits herself. The Swiss Frédéric Mermoud (Complices, Moka) applies himself to designing this obstacle course for a type of fiction of which it is always embarrassing to feel to what extent the springs are conditioned not by a destiny which would succeed in inventing itself under our eyes but of a discourse drawn up in advance which tends towards its idealistic conclusion. This is not unpleasant, we assume that the work of documentation on the level of requirement and learning imposed on the students corresponds to a certain reality, it is very well interpreted (in particular by Suzanne Jouannet in the main role and Maud Wyler as a humiliating teacher) but it’s less a film than a program or an equation with no unknowns.
La Voie royale by Frédéric Mermoud with Suzanne Jouannet, Marie Colomb, Maud Wyler… 1h47.
#Royal #track #Liberation