Zero De Conduite (Zero for Conduct) (1933)
A group of private school children set about plans to cause trouble for the teachers and staff.
The main premise of the story is about order versus chaos, or rebellious freedom fighting against stifling authority. It’s a familiar concept for many school-based comedy films and contained many of the typical tropes like pranks. The temptation to fight against authority is also a relatable one so it’s easy to identify with the young characters.
There aren’t many particularly innovative forms of comedy, it’s usually just odd things occurring in more serious settings and even then the characters don’t always get to acknowledge them or react much. There’s also some disturbing paedophilia suggestions from the teachers which aren’t fully addressed and full frontal nudity of the children, the explanation for which wasn’t immediately present.
The surrealist elements were more entertaining at times than the attempts at comedy. It was also amusing that many of the teachers demonstrated juvenile tendencies and the more repressed characters were more prone to the surreal manifestations. The various effects used with the camera and editing served to create most of the more interesting subtext because they were anomalies.
The narrative is fairly vague, mostly suggestions of plans that the children have mixed with seemingly day-to-day living and learning with occasional avant-garde elements added until the finale. The movie feels closer to an art film than a comedy and even the pranks are so basic that some would be better described as just odd behaviour.
3/10 -This one’s bad but it’s got some good in it, just there-
-Banned in France until after the Second World War.
