Compared with his mother Tammy, his father Raj's thinking always seems to be half a beat slow. He listened to his wife's request, moved to the school district, was reluctant to part with his neighbors, and cried when he separated. At the new neighbor party carefully planned by his wife, he and his daughter danced happily in front of the well-behaved guests, and the angry Mitala brake was cut off to ease the embarrassment; When he went to school to interview his parents, he even gave a preface that didn't match the latter, so that all previous efforts were wasted.
After going through the back door, looking for an intermediary and bribing the principal didn't work, Raj finally found that the situation of choosing a school was far more severe than he had imagined: he witnessed parents queuing at the school gate in the early morning and others queuing at midnight; I also witnessed the "child prodigy" in the training institution switching languages at will and mastering all the 18 talents. His daughter has no extraordinary talent, and as a parent, he has not cultivated foresight in advance. Even though this industry is well known, Raj still lost at the starting line in children's education.
In desperation, Raj can only grasp the last straw-the government stipulates that famous schools can also enjoy quality education by drawing lots to take care of poor families. To this end, he lives in a slum with his family and plays the poor. Not long ago, they were full of luxury goods and eager to integrate into the upper class; In a blink of an eye, I had to experience the hardships of life in a dirty hut with unkempt appearance and dusty face.
The absurdity of this film is obvious. It shows us that the middle class is a fragile and unstable floating group. They want to be accepted by the upper class but are banned (some schools even tell them not to accept businessmen's children), and they are not used to intimate and in-depth exchanges with the bottom workers. As the sandwich layer of society, the middle class is always in a state of anxiety, because their efforts to rise almost became futile in the end. In this forced or voluntary Sisyphus-style slavery, they feel that they are mental patients driven crazy by the times.
The starting line released a dangerous signal to the audience in a comedy way: the few opportunities left for the poor may be being squeezed out. This is reflected in the film. Although Raj suffered a lot, her daughter was finally successfully painted. At the same time, the son of Shyam, Raj's good friend when he was in trouble, had to go to a public school with poor conditions because he lost the election. After the story of Raj pretending to be poor was exposed, Shyam angrily accused him of depriving his children of their rights. Class contradictions have erupted so far. The starting line shows us a cruel fact that the competition for educational resources is a ruthless zero-sum game; The child who loses will pay the price for life.
Intriguingly, it is hard for you to resent Raj, the hero of the "bad guy" who broke the rules of the game. Raj and Shyam did their best for their children respectively-their good friends chose to settle down after being hit by a car in order to collect tuition fees, while Raj gave up his superior living conditions and came to the slums. As fathers, they can understand how much risk and sacrifice a father can make in order to give his children the best things.
This is why Shyam found that he couldn't bear to report another father, so he went into the principal's office with indignation. He knows Raj is a good man. He donated money to public schools. Now that the classroom has been decorated, 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 coming into the office, and his anger turned into sadness.
Finally, the screenwriter of "The Starting Line" made Raj, the leading actor, "discover his conscience" and walked into the principal's office, telling the truth of pretending to be poor and attending a prestigious school. Surprisingly, the seemingly upright headmistress's response only quietly changed Raj's daughter's file. Raj was shocked to see that this educator who repeatedly told the public how he was born in poverty and how the education system stood out was actually a link in the gray interest chain of the whole education industry. Admission, on the surface, is lottery and interview, but in essence, it is the exchange of interests between the school and power and money. In front of the acting skills of this socially responsible headmistress, Raj realized that her trick of pretending to be poor was so naive and ridiculous.
"Who can you report to? Government? Media? Police? Their children also go to school here. " After Raj saw through the headmaster's true colors, the headmaster showed his cards without fear. Those who oppose hidden rules are themselves the biggest hidden rules. In this way, the film throws a thorny question: Apart from the imbalance between supply and demand, to what extent is the difficulty in choosing schools a conspiracy jointly planned by education businessmen and government departments? From the very beginning, The Starting Line gave Tammy's mother the basis for choosing a school-the ranking of a famous school in a magazine. Raj questioned whether this ranking was credible at that time. It's like being carried away by vanity and comparison and buying back a bunch of flashy goods. Tammy and lagido seem to have fallen into the advertising trap of consumer society and gained leeks in hunger marketing.