Zero for Conduct

There are those who will find it hard to believe that a revolt staged by a handful of schoolboys could provide material for anything but a romping farce. Such people will be rather harshly surprised by Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduite, a searing film that uses a pillow fight and other boyish escapades to create a macabre, half-real world of hatred and rebellion.

Vigo gives substance to the students' dream of taking over school, by distorting every scene in just the way that a young, mistreated boy might have imagined it. He uses every camera trick he can to tear us loose from reality. At the same time, he includes so many convincing incidents that it is impossible not to believe in the reality of the dream. He destroys verisimilitude but makes fantasy so credible that I quickly stopped smiling at a puerile conspiracy and began to shudder at the vividness of a revolt prompted by deep injustices and carried out with alarming savagery. It is at once tempting and unpleasant to read Zero as a parable for the adult world, since it unexpectedly shows maturely developed hates and frustrations among children.

I find it exceedingly difficult to characterize Vigo's method of treating dreams and reality. It does not resemble Bergman's use of symbolism, Freudian or otherwise, and it is nothing like the way Jean Genet handles many layers of illusion. Rather, Vigo deliberately distorts his story, visually and dramatically. He injects the outre in the form of a headmaster who is three feet tall and a drawing that comes to life, and he slants his scenario so that the children win. Still, he never departs far enough from normal experience to enter the surreal, and this is precisely what makes one feel that a dream has become real, for it is the nature of most dreams to distort waking life only slightly and make it bizarre without making it totally unrecognizable.

At the height of the conspiracy the boys attack their dormitory proctor with pillows. They hound him into submission in a chaotic onslaught that leaves the room filled with floating feathers. Then the camera switches to slow motion, the feathers hover eerily, and the boys tie their teacher to his bed, which they tilt on its end. Then they march slowly, agonizingly slowly, out of the dormitory, carrying Japanese lanterns intended for a procession in the next day's alumni ceremonies.

This sequence exemplifies Vigo's approach throughout the film. He takes a pillow fight, a normal event in a dorm of twelve-year-olds, and transforms it into a fierce and successful weapon against authority. Then he cuts all this furious activity to a halt and momentarily renders it quite unreal. The pace of the slow-motion section underlines the wildness of the fight and its stylization makes the preposterous pillow victory seem very real by contrast.

I cannot praise too highly the performance turned in by the boys in Vigo's cast. When they stood stop the school's roof in the final moment, I had no doubt that they had won a lasting victory. The impossible had become true; a daydream was reality. It's so convincing, in fact, that the French Ministry of Education suppressed it for fifteen years, fearing that it would cause discipline in the schools to slacken. At a press conference, the film caused a riot.

On the same bill, Peter Lorre plays a homicidal Humbert Humbert in "M," a German expressionist film that was shown here last spring. It's well worth seeing again, especially since Zero for Conduct plays with it.