There are two things that I will take away from Armand, the film written/directed by Halfdan Ullman Tondel and starring Renate Reansve. As a person who has worked at various schools and around teachers and children for many years, I can say it wasn’t always a pleasure for me. I coached sports as well for many of those years. Kids and be good people to work around and help to mold into the adults they will eventually become.Teachers, on the other hand, can be a problem. Well, most of them are generally okay for the most part. As someone who has benefitted from the tutelage of teachers and coaches as a young man, I can say they are more often than not great people. There is a fair share of bad apples who give the one one a bad name. With all the issues regarding canceling the public school system in this country I’m appalled by them. The public school system has been something that has helped make me the man I am today. Kids, though, can be steered in the wrong direction by parents. This film deals with those kinds of issues.

Elizabeth (Renate Rensve) is an ex-actress who is called by her son’s school to come to a parent teacher conference. The boy’s teacher and the parents of the other boy involved in the inciting incident are also involved in the meeting. What has happened between the boys is explained at the meeting, but this doesn;t go over with Rensve’s character. The assistant principal and principal are both eventually brought in to assist in discussing the problem. This woman isn’t going for it, though. She turns the tables on the adults who were responsible for these children. This causes some issues regarding who exactly did what and who’s really responsible for what happened between these boys who were once friends at one point in their childhood.

Rensve has made a name for herself in recent years with films like The Worst Person in the World, Bringing Out the Dead, and A Different Man. Her latest performance in Armand might be a little more divisive. She is an actress many have been keeping their eyes on since her breakout role in The Worst Person in the World. I myself can be included in that. She wow’d me in that film. Not so much in this movie, but that’s for a specific reason. She;s not supposed to. She;s supposed to come across as arrogant and obnoxious, and she does so very well from my perspective. She’s just a very unlikeable person, but she may not be unjustified in her behavior. That’s where she shows she has range as an actress. She’s very believable as this woman. I completely understand where she’s coming from as this character. Especially the way schools can be these days.

There are other actors involved in this film besides Rensve, and they all have interesting relationships with each other. The teachers know these parents because they went to school together when they were younger. There is also a tragedy that is part of an undercurrent that is going on in this film. The involvement in the backstories of these characters by some of the other cast members makes this story more interesting than it otherwise would be. You can’t have a straightforward story. You have to have a convoluted one. That’s what we have here with this movie. That being said, the script is well written, and the director gets good performances out of the entire cast. Even though it’s Rensve, who gives the best performance based on this script.

Teachers Lounge was a film that came out a couple of years ago that dealt with similar material as this one. I feel that the movie has better filmmaking and the depiction of the script by the actors. There was more creativity in that film, where this one lacks innovation or originality. I’ve seen two films about similar topics come out in a short period of time before and usually one is much better than the other is. I don’t like to compare movies on this level, but I feel it’s relevant here. Another similarity between the two stories is that they are both foreign films. The way foreign countries deal with these types of situations is interesting to me. American schools have a whole nother way to deal with this stuff. Even though this stuff isn’t taken seriously in America, it’s sad that any of these types of instances happen at all in any school in this country or another.

Going back to my experience with working around kids and teachers, I don’t forget  you have to be careful. I have 8 nieces and nephews, and I have many friends who have kids and are currently raising them today. The way the world has changed has also changed how kids grow up and how they are affected by their surroundings. The way parents raise them as well can be very different from the past. These stories are a bit disturbing for me to see on screen because I have been around this kind of thing my whole life. I would never want to bring a kid up in this world I live in today. This is a horrible world to grow up in. This movie shows that evidently well. Maybe the writer/director was going for this, I don’t entirely know. That’s for him to know and others who watch this film to find out.

Armand has one thing about it that was weird, but it’s a spoiler, so I won’t get into it in this review. I think it was an odd decision by the writer/director, though. As a whole, this movie was a mixed bag for me. The performances were decent and especially Rensve, who goes to a different place than she’s gone to before in her career. She’s involved in one scene that felt like it was part of a different film, but maybe it was just part of the character she was playing. anyway, it was another weird thing in a movie full of odd things by the filmmaker. The teacher and children aspects of the story weren’t handled very well either for my liking. There needed to be more clarity to the decisions the faculty were involved in making for my liking. This movie didn’t handle these topics very well. That makes the movie not very good from my perspective.

2 ½

Dan Skip Allen