Critic Reviews

Simon explores the extent to which both student and juror care about film, the occasional myopia when it comes to certain advisable standards of political correctness, and the casual way in which some hilariously denigrating remarks can be made.

The movie’s most provocative aspect is its near-methodical portrayal of hive-mind thinking pursued as a kind of norm — not just by the examiners, but the hopeful applicants.

Seeing, in Simon’s documentary, the directing candidates forced to analyze a scene, submit a dossier, step on a set and direct a dictated scene, is like watching the training of hired hands rather than original artists—people better suited to writing grant applications than scripts, better suited to following orders than creating new worlds, to playing the urbane part of a director in meetings and interviews than actually being one.

Simon’s fly-on-the-wall mode is a distancing tool, but shouldn’t be confused with ambivalence. Exposing the mechanics of decision-making is an implicit reproof of increasing conservatism, both of La Fémis itself and the film-makers they are producing.

If the process of passing judgment at all fascinates you (and perhaps it goes without saying that it would fascinate a critic), it’s hard to resist The Competition’s extensive breakdown of how one weighs the merits of artistic goals and visions that tend to elude the usual scoring mechanisms.

Claire Simon knows that the best way to capture the anxiousness of a moment is to leave it unembellished.

In the end, it’s hard to tell whether Simon is actually critical of her establishment’s methods or whether she fully embraces them, although she is clearly compassionate toward the applicants and offers a reasonable payoff when we finally learn who made the cut.

Though The Competition lacks critical distance, what it offers, in spades, is the engrossing experience of watching other people endure pressure and humiliation — a thrill not unlike that of addictive reality TV, though one presumes that everyone involved would retch at the comparison.

What The Competition considers a deliciously exciting rite of passage, viewers might interpret as a kind of cultural rot. The truth likely falls somewhere in between, as Simone’s documentary is too gripping to be dismissed, and too queasy to be accepted.

It’s clear that they want to run it as meritocratically as possible, but what’s interesting is how the criteria for what talent is and who gets to judge it come up for debate.