Philippe Falardeau's Oscar-nominated feature tells the story of an Algerian man who takes over an elementary-school class grieving the loss of their teacher. Subtle, sincere and beautifully acted, this story of scars and healing proves you can bring an audience to tears with the gentlest caress.

Starring: Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nelisse and Emilien Neron

Rating: Four stars out of five

There are more than a few moments in Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar where the emotions hit you from the blind side, and all you can do is sit, feel and fall into the experience.

This surprising urge to deny intellectual processing may be the strongest element in Philippe Falardeau's Oscar-nominated feature, because it mirrors the exact emotional space as its central characters.

For Simon (Emilien Neron), an elementary-school student who stumbles into tragedy, it's expected, because he's just a kid -- and kids don't have the tools to analyze the grown-up chaos around them.

They simply feel, and are forced to muddle through, using whatever survival skills they may have accrued up to that point in time.

But for grown-ups, the reality is different. We feel a need to extract meaning from circumstances, and to masticate mentally, so we can digest the outside world and all its apparent contradictions, chaos and life-altering events with a sense of purpose.

Certainly, this is the instinct we see reflected in the warm brown eyes of Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag), an Algerian applying for refugee status in Canada, and a man who finds himself leading a class of grief-stricken children.

In the opening sequence in this intimately constructed gem, we watch Simon bring milk to his classroom during recess, only to discover a horrific scene: His teacher is dead.

Falardeau lets the camera run from a static position, as we watch Simon run to find help in real time.

Setting up the dramatic event in this opening scene is just a single example of why Monsieur Lazhar is such a crafty piece of work: Falardeau not only instills a sense of impotence by making us watch the kid scramble through the hallways, he also creates a sense of distance by keeping the camera in one place, and shooting Simon's back.

We are not following him down the hallway with a dolly or steadicam. We are stuck, and so are Simon and, as we learn, Monsieur Lazhar.

Because the plot points are introduced so organically, and with such a delicate hand, it would cheapen the viewer's experience to lay them all out in black-and-white print, so I won't go any further into the narrative particulars.

The central dilemma is clear: Simon is scarred by what he sees.

This creates an invisible psychological bond between him and his new substitute teacher, Monsieur Lazhar, because he, too, is carrying baggage from his life back home.

The audience knows this. Monsieur Lazhar knows this, and even Simon, in his id-like way, knows this, too. But we can all thank the creative gods of subtlety this is not Good Will Hunting, or Dead Poets Society: Falardeau resists the urge to play a single violin string.

Using an almost Zen-like restraint, he lets the actors convey these palpable abstracts without a single sledgehammer moment.

As a result, the audience is given a chance to approach these characters on their own terms, which is one of the most gratifying, and, sadly, rare, experiences in contemporary narrative cinema.

It's also why this movie is so good, so sweet and so memorable -- because it mimics the process of getting to know someone.

When we first meet Bachir, we don't know his story. Nor do the other teachers, but over the course of watching the very simple drama unfold, we begin to feel a kinship with this man, whose life has been shaped by acts of violence in a foreign country.

By the time we've fully identified with his plight, we're thrown into a government hearing room, as lawyers and immigration officials debate whether or not he should be allowed to stay in Canada.

These moments are profoundly striking, because the officials are essentially representing the average Canadian, who may not always have innate sympathy with the outsider seeking to settle down in the Great White North.

The cold, colourless walls of the hearing room make the space feel like a refrigerator, where emotions are flash-frozen, processed and packaged in red tape and triplicate forms.

Like Simon, Monsieur Lazhar is in a somewhat powerless position. And even though he's an adult, with undeniable intellectual ability, he's unable to move forward.

Falardeau does such a masterful job linking the two characters without great swaths of dialogue, shared scenes or exposition, that he creates emotional suspense through sheer empathy.

The best part is, when the emotional moments actually happen, it's the viewer's own heart at work -- not a frenetic, cinematic climax conjured with cheap, graphic tricks.

Too often, dramas can feel like emotional porn, and we feel cheap, once we pull out the tissue to dry our eyes. Monsieur Lazhar proves you can bring an audience to tears with the gentlest caress, and the simplest of stories, as long as you're sincere.

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