You don't have to be parenting a grade-school kid for the Belgian drama "Playground" to shred your nerves or break your heart, though I can attest that it helps. (So does having been a grade-school kid yourself.) A sharply chiseled, wrenchingly observed first feature written and directed by Laura Wandel, the movie follows a 7-year-old named Nora (Maya Vanderbeque) as her primary education begins and she finds herself adrift in a cold, gray world of commonplace cruelty. You'll recognize a lot of what she witnesses and endures: the cruel insults, the violent scuffles, the ineffectual parent-teacher interventions. Mostly you'll recognize Nora, whose extraordinarily sad, watchful gaze expresses all the pain and confusion that she can't yet put into words.
Wandel confronts you with that gaze in the movie's grabber of an opening shot as Nora, her face streaked with tears, clings tightly to her older brother, Abel (Gunter Duret). It's her first day of school, and they're saying goodbye not only to their father (Karim Leklou) but also to each other. Barely a few years apart in age, Nora and Abel seem particularly close — maybe closer than you'd expect, since society, like the movies, tends to reinforce lazy assumptions about sibling animus, especially between brothers and sisters. "Playground" doesn't just suggest the opposite; it grasps that, while these ties can be a source of anger and shame, they can also be a crucial emotional lifeline. A moral one too.
Over time, Nora and Abel will be gradually ripped apart, sometimes by banal institutional rules (kids from different grades aren't allowed to sit together at lunch) but more often by the cruel Darwinian logic of the schoolyard. There's a reason why Abel avoids Nora at recess, one that she discovers on Day One, when she crosses into the big kids' zone and catches her brother picking on some kids with a taller, tougher classmate, Antoine (Simon Caudry). Abel has already learned one of life's uglier lessons — bully or be bullied — and he warns Nora not to get involved, not just because she risks becoming a target but because she could turn him into one too. His fears turn out to be depressingly well founded.
