Parents with school-aged children, especially those in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc., can quickly find resonance in the hero and heroine of "Starting Line" who are struggling to choose a school, hit a wall everywhere, and are full of foreign appearances. Although the film is a work with a strong comedy color, its appeal to the core theme is quite serious and reflective. Today's parenting wars that do not respect national borders have evolved into a sharp social problem in Asia, where the population base is huge and high-quality educational resources are scarce. You can deeply appreciate in the movie how parents work hard, endure humiliation, and even unscrupulous in order to allow their children to achieve a class transition in the future or at least maintain their current class status.
The golden age of identity reshuffle has passed, and this generation of parents, who have accumulated wealth and grown up through self-struggle, realizes that the upward passage in our era is getting narrower and narrower. The increasingly younger age of educational competition is, to some extent, the instinctive response of people to the crisis awareness of the development of future generations. This kind of mentality of fear of being left behind has formed the so-called "one step behind, one step behind" vicious circle after the group fermented - if a child can't go to a good primary school, he can't go to a good middle school; if he can't go to a good middle school, he can't go to a good University; if you don't go to a good university, you can't find a good job...
In the film, the reason why mother Mita, regardless of cost, did everything possible to send her daughter to a prestigious school, was because of her deep belief in this reasoning model. Mita repeatedly emphasized that if her daughter cannot get into a good school, the chances of her self-deprecation, self-abandonment, and self-destruction will increase exponentially. As a mother, she is of course obliged to strive for the best learning environment for her daughter and minimize this negative possibility.
Compared with Mita Mita, Papa Raj always seemed to think half a beat slower. When he moved his family to the school district at his wife's request, he was reluctant to part with his neighbors and wept bitterly when they separated; at his wife's carefully planned new neighbor party, he and his daughter danced happily in front of well-mannered guests , Annoyed, Mitara turned off the power to ease the embarrassment; when he went to the school for the parental interview for admission, he even gave an answer that didn't fit in the preamble, so much so that all his previous efforts were abandoned.
After going through the back door, finding an intermediary, and bribing the principal, all of which didn't work, Raj finally found that the school selection situation was far more severe than he had imagined: he witnessed the school gate in the early morning, and the parents waiting for the number to be in a long queue late at night; The "little prodigy" in the training institution can switch between several languages at will, and master all eighteen talents. His daughter has no extraordinary talent, and he, as a parent, does not have the foresight to be cultivated in advance. Even though the business is doing well and becoming famous, Raj seems to have lost at the starting line in terms of children's education.
Desperate, Raj could only grab the last straw—the government stipulates a lottery admission system for elite schools to take care of poor families and also enjoy high-quality education. To this end, he took the whole family to live in the slums and played the poor. Not long ago, they were crammed with luxuries and eager to integrate into the upper class; in a blink of an eye, they had to experience the hardships of life in a dingy hut, unkempt and disfigured.
The absurdity of the film is undoubtedly revealed at this point. It shows us that the middle class is a fragile and unstable mobile group. They want to be accepted by the upper class but are hindered (some schools even tell them not to accept the children of businessmen), and they are not used to being with the lower class. Workers trust each other and communicate deeply. The reason why the middle class, as the middle layer of society, is always in a state of anxiety is that their various efforts to ascend are almost turned into futility in the end, in this forced or voluntary Sisyphus day-to-day push the stone. In the hard labor up the mountain, they felt like mental patients driven mad by the times.
"Starting Line" uses comedy to send a dangerous signal to the audience: those few opportunities for the poor may be being squeezed. This is reflected in the film that although Raj suffered a lot of crimes, his daughter was finally selected; at the same time, the son of Shyam, Raj's good friend when he was "in trouble", had to go to the contest because he was not selected. Poor public schools. When Raj's deeds of pretending to be poor are revealed, Shyam angrily accuses him of depriving his children of the rights. Class conflicts have exploded. The cruel truth that "Starting Line" shows us is that the competition for educational resources is a ruthless zero-sum game; the price for the lost child will be his entire life.
What's intriguing is that it's hard for you to feel disgusted with the "bad guy" hero Raj, who has broken the rules of the game. Raj and Shyam, both of them did the best things they could for their children - their good friends chose to go private after being hit by a car in order to make money for school fees, while Raj gave up their good living conditions and came here. slum. As fathers, they understand how much risk and sacrifice a father can make in order to give his children the best.
That's why Shyam found he couldn't bear to report another father at all, before he walked into the principal's office indignantly to report it. He knew that Raj was a good person, and he felt guilty about it. He had donated money to the public school. Now that the classrooms have been renovated and the children can read English books, maybe he should thank him more. The era of letting a good man do bad things is undoubtedly a bad era. Shyam stopped walking into the office, and the anger in his heart turned into sadness.
In the end, the screenwriter of "Starting Line" let the actor Raj "discover his conscience", walked into the principal's office and told the truth about pretending to be a poor man to go to a prestigious school. Surprisingly, the seemingly upright headmistress's response was to change the file of Raj's daughter in a calm manner. Raj was shocked to see that this educator, who repeatedly told the public how he came from a poor background and how the education system stood out, was actually a link in the gray interest chain of the entire education industry. Admission, on the surface, is a lottery and interview, but in essence it is an exchange of interests between the school and power and money. In front of the acting skills of the headmistress who is full of social responsibility and a righteous educator, Raj realizes that his trick of pretending to be poor is so childish and ridiculous.
"Who can you report to? The government? The media? The police? Their children also go to school here." After Raj saw the principal's true colors, the principal showed his cards without fear. Those who oppose unspoken rules are themselves the biggest unspoken rules. In this way, the film raises a thorny question: In addition to the imbalance of supply and demand, to what extent is the difficulty of choosing a school a conspiracy jointly planned by education businessmen and government departments? "Starting Line" gave Mita's basis for choosing a school from the beginning - a magazine's ranking of famous schools, and Raj questioned whether the ranking was credible at the time. It's like buying back a bunch of flashy products because of vanity and comparisons. Mita and Rajdo seem to be caught in the advertising trap of the consumer society and become harvested leeks in hunger marketing.
Although famous schools may be recognized, as shown in the movie, many training institutions and educational intermediaries, large and small, have made enough profits by taking advantage of parents' anxiety. Even though enrollment has gradually become a game that can be played by those with vested interests, people want to quit the school selection battle but can’t help themselves. Children without talent and family background can only compete with each other who is more diligent and attends more training courses. , preschool education has completely changed from collective rationality to collective irrationality: the original purpose of developing intelligence has changed, and the alienated childhood has early become a new object squeezed by the needs of capital expansion.
Through "Starting Line", we can see that the current educational monstrosity is that the upper classes are admitted without any effort, the people at the bottom are resigned to their fate and at the mercy of the rules of the lottery, and the middle class is racking their brains, like the Raj couple. There are no people inside and out. To choose a school, the middle class pays a high monetary cost in exchange for an optimistic expectation that class reproduction will run relatively smoothly.
In contrast to the classic slogan "Don't let children lose at the starting line", we are alertly aware that this is a bowl of poisonous ecstasy soup that capital pours into anxious parents. All parents who are obsessed with providing their children with the best education tend to overlook what is best for their children. But the irreversibility of growth makes "best fit" an untestable paradox. For the vast majority of parents, they simply and crudely believe that the best is what is best for the child.
From this perspective, let's interpret the ending of the movie: Raj and Mitta let their daughter give up the famous school and go to the public school. This "impulsive" decision is too thin from the perspective of character analysis: Are there really vested interests willing to sacrifice their privileges for the rights and interests of the disadvantaged, so as to teach their daughter a lesson on "what is justice"? ? Really rich people will probably let their children learn how to use the rules like they do.
So we can only tend to think that Raj felt that her daughter was not suitable for the so-called elite school. The glamorous upper class is actually full of hypocrisy and indifference, all for the benefit of exchanges. Very young children will crowd out their friends who are isolated and do not speak English, not to mention those unpredictable adults; while the people at the bottom are in their own pockets. are willing to share their water and food with you. From the perspective of different educational concepts, we can interpret the protagonist's decision as more hope that the daughter will learn good qualities such as kindness, mutual assistance, and caring for others, rather than knowledge with prejudice and discrimination.
"Starting Line" was born in the era of globalization. In the film, we see the phenomenon of school district housing, lottery, back door, education commercialization and other phenomena are not special national conditions but common phenomena, which allows the film to become a media mirror of our society. A good movie is not responsible for solving problems (that's far more than a movie can do), but for asking them. "Starting Line" wants to ask such a powerful but helpless question: Who is promoting the commercialization of education and taming children into machines for further education? And my deepest impression after reading it is: I can't find the answer to this question.
View more about Hindi Medium reviews
