France, Détours – Ce trait c’est ton parcours

The programme “Le fil continu” is for lower secondary students who have been temporarily expelled from school for bad conduct. They work either individually or in groups with the social workers on understanding why they were sanctioned. For much of the film, the adults are left off-screen. Though absent from the image, they are overly present through their discourse. Focussing initially on the students’ viewpoint, France, détours also captures the details of their body language, which reveal their boredom, their indifference, sometimes their acquiescence. Above all, it documents an educational relationship empty of content (knowledge is out of the picture) and reduced to a few moral principles tinged with affect. “You’re not obliged to like me”, concedes the director to a hateful student. “I like all of you”, she nonetheless lets out later… The swing between an uthoritarian posture and amicable negotiation depends to a large extent on the adults’ self-staging. Their little charade uses legal vocabulary (charter, contract), but will the device be enough to set the students back on course and straighten out the “line” again?