‘Playground’—A Sister Torn Between Trust and Torment: Review

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Playground (2021)

A Belgian-based tale of physical and psychological bullying, Playground garnered significant acclaim on the festival circuit, winning the prestigious FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

★★★★✰

We all hold memories of the playground—the anarchic physicality, the indistinct noise, the constant social questions, and corrections. Playground, from Belgian first-time feature director Laura Wandel, captures the subjective experience of childhood guilt in an episode of familial separation and reconciliation cast over a conventional backdrop of counting, reading, swimming, and writing.

The film opens with an image of Nora (Maya Vanderbeque), returning to school after a break, tightly hugging her big brother Abel (Günter Duret). She is crying and afraid. Abel reassures Nora that they will see each other again if she can just make it through until break time. They separate across the playground. As Nora settles over time, she realises that Abel is the target of extreme bullying. Her brother needs help, but why are they doing this?

Playground depicts school as a complicated, often arbitrary, place. It is the place you learn to tie your laces for the first time, the place you are—rightly or wrongly—taught what a ‘scrounger’ is, the place you learn how to conform and disobey. At school, anxiety dwells in both noise and silence. The noise of the football game and the silence of the balance beam. The noise of the canteen and the silence that comes after a teacher’s question. The noise above the water and the silence beneath it. Can you read the next line? You can’t tie your shoelaces? Why aren’t you eating your lunch?

Playground is shot in tight, invasive close-ups; the background is often out of focus, as we are drawn into Nora’s suffocating psychological space. We see things incompletely, with much of the action taking place out of frame. We witness some violence but are left straining to see what isn’t willingly revealed. Nora’s moments of embarrassment, such as falling off a balance beam, are withheld from us, cut off before we can witness the aftermath of inevitable raucous laughter. We are not shown it because we know it—we have already experienced it. This is indicative of something the film achieves more deeply; it urges you to imagine, project your own experiences, and extend the frame beyond that which you see on screen. The grey of the playground which invades the pale colour palette is forever ingrained in our minds.

The film is astonishing in that its prime mover is a young girl’s face. There are very few notable performances that communicate as much emotion through breathing, swallowing, and tremors of the mouth. Vanderbeque’s eyes carry the brutal tension of a child who realises she cannot help her brother and cannot obey her father. She miraculously displays her conscience through her countenance. We witness through reaction shot after reaction shot, a child at the mercy of her environment and the forces that dictate the rules and reality. This is The Playground of Joan of Arc—with passion aside.

Maya Vanderbeque and Günter Duret in Playground (photo courtesy of Dragons Films)

Playground is a film that foregrounds children, but it is also about the absence, or powerlessness, of authority figures. Adults enter the frame only as they choose to drop down and meet Nora face-to-face, out of empathy or otherwise. The camera never moves above a child’s-eye level. There is a suggestion that even the grown-up teachers don’t know what to do about the bullying, about the playground, while the father is trapped outside of the school gates, a distant figure.

This central critique that the absence of authority figures (and effective procedures) enables bullying, however, is the most incoherent dimension of Playground. The film doesn’t fully justify its allusions. At different points in the film, teachers are portrayed as ignorant, dismissive, and forceful. Nora is increasingly depicted as unsuccessfully navigating the school’s systems of escalation. It is possible that this is a testament to the difficulty of dealing with adolescent chaos, which arrives in schools without reason or motivation, but it feels like a particularly cynical portrayal of anti-bullying procedures.

Playground is a disarming slice of subjective cinema. The film depicts school life as more complicated than reading and counting, but rather as something that depends upon speaking and calculating; help and betrayal are blurred on the playground, where everyone, it seems, must do it alone. For Nora, and other children her age, much is out of focus, by anxiety or disinterest. But certain things do make it into focus—a teacher, a friend, a father, a brother. When we shift to Abel’s perspective, feeling his rage, carrying the weight of his sadness, and directing his violence, we can hear Nora’s heart collapse. That silent sound is true empathy—and the beginning of true reconciliation.

The Verdict 

Playground, with a minimal story, manages to capture the vast depths of school life through close-up camerawork and an unforgettable central performance. It is an exceptional first feature from Laura Wandel, who is an upcoming director to watch.

Words by Ben Thomas


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