Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Classroom

I've tended to rate "Classroom" as one of the weaker entries in that early wave of "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" PIFs, chiefly because it's always struck me as the one that flirts the most uncomfortably with outright sentimentality. No matter how noble the message in question, when it's being repeatedly expounded by an entire sequence of forlorn schoolchildren, it's hard to shake the feeling that the film is maybe yanking a little too heavily on the heartstring factor. Really though, it's more that the multi-voice format used in "Classroom" (unlike others of its era, it is not a monologue, but a collection of snippets from various different monologues, pieced together to relate a complete narrative) causes it to feel less intimate and more overstated than its contemporaries. "Jenny" works as well as it does for the haunting portrait it creates of the central figure's isolation - for 30 seconds, we're plunged head-first into her world, sharing in her numbness and her disconnect from the activity around her, as she goes about a seemingly nondescript routine that involves having to cope with her daughter's hospitalisation and dull prospects of recovery. "Fireman's Story" has a punchy, genuinely startling performance from Ken Stott, in which he gets to run the gamut of emotions. "Classroom" deploys somewhat a different tactic, in attempting to represent the voice of a collective. Rather than hone in on one damaged individual, the idea was to create a sense of the impact of a drink driving accident upon a young community, as they grapple with the loss of one of their number. The intoxicated driver who hit and killed the absent Matthew is also responsible for shattering the innocence of the multitude of children who now must come to terms with this cruel turn of events. The result is solemn, but nowhere near as brutally as immersive as those aforementioned PIFs; it stakes the bulk of its emotional impact on the fact that its sombre observations are being delivered by children's voices, without attempting to get too up close and personal with any specific one of them.

Which is not to say that "Classroom" has nothing going for it. It manages to inject some teeth into the proceedings, thanks to that one child who makes the purpose of the PIF explicit: "It was the driver that did it. Been down the boozer, hadn't he?" There's a distinct air of jadedness to this kid's delivery, sounding like it comes less from a place of ruptured innocence that it does knowing disappointment. Embedded in there is a searing condemnation of an adult world that should absolutely know better but inevitably lets itself and its younger charges down. "Classroom" is also a fine enough example of the D&DWL campaign playing to its earlier strengths by purporting to show a picture of normalcy and subverting it. Like "Jenny", it deals with the semblance of routine, of characters attempting to carry on with the most banal of affairs when their whole universe has been irrevocably shattered. On a visual level, there's nothing overtly disturbing about the content of "Classroom", although even without the internal monologues we might still pick up that the atmosphere is all wrong. We see a teacher calling out her class register, as the specified children each gesture to confirm their presence, yet as we pan through the rows of children there is an uneasy stillness to their presentation. We would expect a class full of schoolkids to be way more fidgety, to be nudging and whispering among themselves, but the mood around here is one of deadening stiffness. The stinger is in the final reveal of that vacant desk, and the child to the side of it who identifies Matthew as his best friend (their particular closeness is already signalled in his particularly blank-eyed expression). The use of internal voices, pasted atop this sequence of emotional inertia, suggests that, while the loss of Matthew hangs heavily over all of these children, it is not something they are discussing openly; it becomes an unspoken yet omnipresent tension amid the expectation that life continue on in much the same way as it did before the accident happened. The futility of this expectation is underscored in the image of Matthew's empty chair, a constant and tangible reminder of his absence; meanwhile, the registration process, a seemingly nondescript formality, becomes its own grim exercise, in reinforcing the fact that, day after day, one of their number is not showing up.

Notably, we're told that their teacher was crying when she'd broke the news of Matthew's demise to his classmates, although there is no indication of her emotional turmoil in what we see in the sequence. We do not doubt that she's had to deal with grief of her own, but for the purposes of the PIF she becomes yet another manifestation of those arduous formalities attempting, in vain, to brush over the trauma of what has occurred. We sense that what these children are struggling to accommodate, in their fractured young psyches, pertains not just to the grotesque inconsiderateness of their elders and the cruelty of the universe, but to the broader indifference of both.