I think topics surrounding teachers and children are among the most difficult to portray on film in a textured and nuanced way. Rookies, directed by veteran dance documentarians Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai, does exactly that. New themes emerge and develop with each interview and its accompanying dance sequence. These themes range from the deeply personal to the broadly societal, and in every case, the directors have the clarity of purpose and perspective to explore each interaction from every possible angle.
We follow a group of young students in Paris aspiring to be professional dancers as they navigate a prestigious high school and its well-funded hip-hop dance program during their freshman year (hence the title). Many of these kids come from working-class backgrounds and less-than-stellar home lives. There is talk of parental abuse, fitting in and standing out as a racial minority, and even the consideration of dropping out of school altogether. The dancing is often sensational, but the challenges these kids face are never sensationalized, and that’s the film’s core strength. It tackles all these issues head-on, but never in any sort of cloying way.
Dance is certainly a form of escape and self-expression for each of these children, but Rookies is much too intelligent for that to be its easy or solitary takeaway. What the film does so well is to enter the emotional headspace of these students and teachers, regardless of background or specific struggles. In one sequence, the principal, a teacher, and the dance team leader meet with each kid at the midpoint of the school year. Some might find the amount of camera setups to shift focus to each face in this scene distracting, but it’s serving a grand purpose: to show the cultural disconnects between teachers and students, and how those prickly blind spots can lead to emotional turmoil. You clearly see the school officials’ good intentions, but the task of truly reaching a child emotionally is more difficult than a smile or an encouraging word. There’s a wall built by a previous, even more disjointed society which, in many respects, often seems like only a great teacher can fully tear down. The boldness of this film’s approach is to show both success and failure in this effort, a crucial choice which builds empathy for everyone throughout the narrative.
Co-director Teurlai also served as the film’s editor, and his choices are crisp and poignant throughout. A film like this runs the risk of following a very predictable structure, and Teurlai resists this at every turn. Every cut from interview to dance is an emotional choice rather than a stylistic one. The children we focus on most closely seem to dictate the pace of the film given their individual challenges. Given the size of the group, that’s a lot for one editor to follow, but Teurlai layers this journey so well that whatever comes next — especially right after some of the film’s biggest emotional tentpoles — always feels like the right thing to cut to.
Especially for a film about dance, Rookies feels perfectly balanced. It never strays down a melodramatic path, but it isn’t blind to the issues it touches on, either. There’s a breathtakingly poignant world of said and unsaid in so many scenes here, and that’s because Demaizière and Teurlai got to the heart of the matter: portraying each of their subjects as three-dimensionally as possible. We feel we know them well enough to be fully invested in their every peak and valley. Those are the kind of smooth moves no film should be without. | George Napper
Rookies is now available on DVD and streaming on OVID.
(In French with English subtitles)
