Le Brio (2017)

A professor of law at Panthéon-Assas delivers a racially charged public humiliation to a student from Créteil, the clip travels online, and the dean sentences the two of them to a debating contest together. This is the entire architecture of Le Brio, and it is a sturdy one. Yvan Attal directs with the patient, slightly weary competence of a man who knows exactly which buttons a French audience will press. Daniel Auteuil plays Mazard as a man whose cynicism is a costume he has worn so long it has fused to the skin. Camélia Jordana's Neïla is the more interesting creation, a young woman from the banlieue who refuses the role of victim while also refusing to pretend the insult did not land.

The film's true engine is race, and it does not flinch from that. Mazard's outburst is not a misunderstanding to be smoothed over; it is a specific wound, and the plot is explicitly about two people dismantling their own prejudices in front of each other. Neïla also has to fight for standing in a faculty that treats her as an intruder twice over, though the screenplay frames this as a matter of individual merit and grit, not as a systemic indictment. There is a faint gesture toward the way elite institutions guard their gates, and that is as far as the economic argument goes. Nothing here concerns the climate, the body, or the mind's varied wiring, and no queer thread runs through the story at all.

What we get instead is rhetoric. The film is structured around lectures and a formal oratory competition, so its moral arrives through speeches, rebuttals, and set-piece declamations. It lectures, in the most literal sense available to cinema. The result is earnest, well-acted, and occasionally stirring, a film convinced that a well-argued paragraph can dissolve a century of contempt. It cannot, but watching two fine performers pretend otherwise for ninety minutes is not the worst way to spend an evening.