It’s ironic that “Le Concours” (“The Graduation”), a documentary that details a strict film school that demands an airtight and perfectionist grasp of cinema from its students, is a sloppily edited, horribly paced, and shockingly amateurish mess that should not have been released to audiences in the first place.
Claire Simon’s film covers the months-long entrance exams for the French film school La Femis, a renowned institution that accepts only 40 applicants every year out of a pool of thousands. The school is split into various departments: directing, producing, screenwriting, production design, and so forth. After the initial elimination round where the aspiring young filmmakers with the least effective applications are taken out of the running, the handful of finalists have to create original concepts that apply to their intended departments. Then they have to go through long pitch sessions where they sell their ideas, and themselves as potential students, to panels of industry experts. On the surface, this is a meaty premise, one that could especially attract the attention of young aspiring filmmakers who want to get a front-seat look at what film education really entails.
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Simon could have used this setup to explore the dreams and aspirations of such filmmakers, following them as they go through an exciting yet terrifying journey as they’re beset with various insecurities about the validity of their art, mixed with the thrilling possibility that they might get to express it through a highly respected educational institution. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I’ll do it with 100% confidence here: The previous sentence is a hell of a lot more emotionally involving and empathetic than the entirety of “Le Concours,” which spends 90% of its runtime casually recording, as if part of a clinical corporate video, the tedious and uneventful admission interviews between the experts and the applicants.
The documentary has a mind-numbingly episodic structure that puts the audience through a seemingly infinite loop of interview footage, followed by snarky comments and discussions about the applicant post-interview. Half of these comments will come across as unintelligible gobbledygook, since they relate to specific rules and guidelines of the school, none of which we’re privy to before watching the doc.
If the narrative is disappointing, so too are the technical accomplishments, of which there are few to speak of. Simon obviously brought a tiny crew, as evidenced by the extremely short credits, to film the application process without any aesthetic or thematic concern. The video footage is very amateurish, with cameras constantly shaking and struggling to find proper framing. Beyond that, there aren’t any interviews or artistic touches like the use of music or clever transitions, and the subjects never even acknowledge the presence of the cameras.
This kind of extremely dry “fly on the wall” approach can work (Peter Davis’ Vietnam doc “Hearts And Minds” is a masterpiece partly because of this style), but the danger is that it always walks that fine line between pure cinema and inconsequential home video. The film’s editing could have helped shape the slipshod production, but it turns out to be its biggest problem. As if trolling the audience who wants to find out more about the kids, we get barely a minute’s worth of footage that covers their prep work for the interviews, before cutting back to the experts putting them down while chain smoking. Fascinating stuff.
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There are also some bizarrely slow-paced editing choices. There’s a scene where we, for some reason, watch a receptionist answer a phone call about admissions, then watch for half a minute as he goes back to his computer to resume his work. We wouldn’t stick around a receptionist’s desk after having our question answered in order watch him do his job, so why are we doing that here? Another scene lingers for almost a minute on a student gathering his things after an interview. Was it important for the audience to know which model of iPod classic the student owns?
What’s the purpose of this film? Is it to promote La Femis? I don’t think so, since 1) the school receives thousands of applications every year and doesn’t need to be promoted, and 2) the experts come across as such jerks that the doc might even hurt the school’s reputation. Is it to give audiences a firsthand look into how a film school works? That doesn’t make sense either, since practically every film school has their own unique approach in cultivating the artistic visions of the students. And finally, if the goal was to communicate how it feels to be a young filmmaker with hopes of making it big, we would have spent more than three minutes of screen time with those kids. Unfocused and unpolished, “Le Concours” might’ve been fared better if one of the prospective students picked up the camera instead. [D-]