Bachir Lazhar (Fellag) (Courtesy of Music Box Films)

Simon (Émilien Néron) comes back from recess at his Montreal elementary school, to make a gruesome discovery: his teacher Martine has hung herself in her own classroom. After reading about the incident in the newspaper, Bachir Lazhar (Algerian comedian/playwright Mohammed Fellag) arrives at the devastated school to apply for Martine’s job as a substitute teacher. This sets into motion the wheels of director Philippe Falardeau’s quietly powerful film.

The premise of Monsieur Lazhar may seem well-meaning but not very promising. The classroom is a tried and often tired setting for drama that’s supposed to teach us something. This case is particularly loaded: let’s learn from other cultures and in the process learn something about ourselves. But Falardeau’s unobtrusive direction, and the restrained performance of Fellag and the child actors, make this a powerful, unsentimental film that doesn’t make you feel like you’re hearing a lecture.

The grief is the thing. Falardeau gradually reveals that the teacher, whose name translates to “Mister Lucky” has his own tragic past. The students’ relationship with their dead teacher, and with each other, also turns out to be more complicated than it first appears.

Simon (Émilien Néron) and Alice (Sophie Nélisse) (Courtesy of Music Box Films)

Lazhar’s job as a teacher would be difficult even if his background and methods were not foreign and by some accounts backwards. But an undercurrent of the film is the zero-tolerance policy against touching students. The film is specific to the Montreal school system but could stand in for schools anywhere. Teachers are forbidden from inflict corporal punishment or having any other inappropriate contact with students, and this is the kind of policy parents would want. But regulations also forbid encouraging pats on the back or, God forbid, a hug. For the painful present and past that inhabit these characters hearts, their actions are restrained, as if being kept in check by what is in effect a kind of emotional security theater. Such policies certainly prevent abuses, but do they also hamper genuine relationships?

Monsieur Lazhar began its creative life as a one-man play, but you’d never know that from the way the various students and teachers populate this school. But a sense of theater remains, as the excellent cast of children and adults perform in the boundaries—physical and institutional—of the classroom. Lazhar could have been another fish out of water, and Fellag’s history as a comic might bring to mind Robin William’s didactic turn in Good Will Hunting, which Lazhar seems to reference. But the lessons here are learned more by observation than platitudes and slogans. Lazhar’s characters, adult and child alike, navigate treacherous cultural and emotional minefields, and the resulting dramatic tension and resolution is genuinely moving without being maudlin.

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Monsieur Lazhar
Written and directed by Phillip Falardeau.
With Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, and Émilien Néron.
Running time 94 minutes
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, a disturbing image and brief language
Opens today at E Street and Bethesda Row.