Beginnings and Endings.

Bertrand Tavernier is the most enterprising, various, humane, and sensitive filmmaker in France today-or, more simply put, the finest. Starting with The Clockmaker, the now-59-year-old director has turned out every kind of film. Some may remember him best for the thriller The Judge and the Assassin, others for the historical Let the Feast Begin, many for the family saga A Sunday in the Country or the antiwar Life and Nothing But. Still others for the jazz film Round Midnight, shot partly in New York. There are several other films just as good, and now comes his 19th feature, the masterly It All Starts Today.

This is a film about a kindergarten somewhere in the north of France. The actual one used is in Anzin, a suburb of Valenciennes. It is in the heart of what was once coal-mining country; Zola's Germinal takes place nearby. Always poor, these folk-with the closing of the mines and widespread unemployment-are now at rock bottom. The kindergarten teachers try to keep the minds and spirits of the tots going, despite a lack of money, hygiene, and even food in most of the homes they come from.

Tavernier's daughter, Tiffany, and her husband, Dominique Sampiero, collaborated on the script with the director. Sampiero has taught in just such schools for years, even though he is a novelist with twelve books to his credit. The film's protagonist, Daniel Lefebvre, is freely modeled on him, and incorporates numerous characters and incidents from his teaching career. What inspired the film was a particular recollection of a young single mother he reprimanded for falling behind on the 30-francs' ($4.50) monthly payment for tiny treats for the children. Thirty francs, she replied, was what she kept herself and her children alive with each month on stale crackers dipped in milk.

Such stories accumulated from Sampiero's memories. There was the kid who would not rat on the "uncle" (really his mother's lover) who beat him savagely; the student whose loving mother collapsed drunk in the schoolyard; another mother, unable to pay the electric bill, whose family was living in darkness for months; the parents who could not face getting out of bed and shepherding their boy to and from school; the kids who did not know what a trade is, and so on and on.

Daniel, head of the school, copes prodigiously. But he has other problems as well. Valeria, with whom he lives, is a sculptress cum waitress, with a child of her own. The boy resents not being told who his (worthless) father is, and takes it out on Daniel. Valeria would like to be married, but Daniel is reluctant. Their story alone could make up a whole movie.

Then there is Daniel's aged father, unwilling to move from the house in which he lived as a miner, and a problem for his wife. That Daniel unremuneratively teaches tots, instead of going into business like his brother, torments the old man. And then he has a stroke. In all this there is a movie, too.

And then the stories of all those unemployed fathers, desperate mothers, and deprived kids. Yet this film is far from being solidly gloomy; it is also full of smiles-in the interaction among teachers and pupils, teachers and teachers, diverse social workers, a mayor, a school inspector, a policeman, and others. Daniel's skirmishes with the child-support agency, the mayor, the whole bureaucracy, are often horribly ludicrous, and the way lack of money can stimulate ingenuity is frequently charming.

There are other threads. Daniel's (really Dominique's) prose poems weave their way through the film, beautifully cosmic yet also specific. Tavernier and his gifted cinematographer, Alain Choquart, work in stark cityscapes as well as severely comely landscapes. And always the faces of the children, mostly the 33 pupils in a class of the Anzin kindergarten, whose parents, reduced to watching American television, have absurdly named them William or Kevin or Kelly, or even, in the case of a pair of twins, Starsky and Hutch. Yet when Daniel and the kids sing French nursery songs together, God is in His heaven.

There are other memorable characters: Samia, a novice social worker, who becomes Daniel's staunchest ally, notably in getting the children medical treatment. Or Mme Delacourt, the most senior teacher, who exudes a wonderfully melancholy tenacity. Or the overextended Communist mayor, or the maid who becomes a surrogate mother to young and old.

Daniel, with tough love, unsentimental empathy, and heroic indignation, is at the center of unremitting onslaughts, drama lurking everywhere. But there are also moments of relaxation, lovemaking, shared meals, dancing, and sometimes humorous quarrels. Quite a bit is improvised, but so skillfully that it never becomes, as so often in movies, embarrassingly obvious. And almost no one, not even the child-support bureaucrats who hang up on Daniel, is treated as a villain.

The wonder is how Tavernier keeps more stories going in under two hours than a tabloid has articles, how he manages to connect them smoothly without losing the narrative thread or the audience's involvement. The camera rushes around quite a lot, yet does not induce dizziness; chaos is kept in a firm directorial hand.

Philippe Torreton of the Comedie Francaise, these days Tavernier's favorite leading man, has a face and body language that convey Daniel's fundamental innocence and experience-hardened practicality to lovably pigheaded perfection. He is splendidly supported by Maria Pitaresi as Valeria, and everybody else, including local amateurs pungent in their bit parts. But this is a film that does not conform to American expectations, and may be short-lived on our screens. If you can possibly catch It All Starts Today, do so today. Tomorrow may be too late.

--A sad disappointment is Madadayo, the great Akira Kurosawa's 30th and last film, which he made at age 83 as his own epitaph, five years before his death in 1998. Though written by himself, it is based on a novel derived from a true story. We are in 1943, Japan is beginning to lose the war, and Professor Uchida, a beloved university German teacher, decides to retire and write books. He has a devoted wife, and his loving students, four of them in particular, try to make his modest circumstances pleasanter.

When his house is destroyed in an air raid, Uchida and his wife make do in a cramped hut. Eventually, the students build him a dream house, complete with doughnut-shaped pond in which the fish can swim uninterruptedly. When his beloved alley cat disappears, the students make frantic efforts to retrieve it. And they keep coming to visit him, though he would prefer being left alone. Every year on his birthday, they throw him a banquet, during which they ritually ask, "Mahda-kai?" (Are you ready to go hence?) to which he answers, "Madadayo" (Not yet). The years go by and Uchida falls ill at one of these banquets, to which by now students bring children and grandchildren. Rushed home, he has a symbolic dream about a favorite childhood game.

The film is enormously static, and its trivial events fail to acquire universal stature. One gets a sense neither of the great teacher nor of the successful writer, only of the quirky eccentric. Uchida's not-very-profound remarks are received as sublime philosophy, his feeble jokes elicit bursts of laughter and lengthy applause. Even the actors, the leading one included, are less than winning, though Kyoko Kagawa is touching as the wife. It is a film that suffers from a sort of arterial sclerosis, and however much I treasure Kurosawa, there were few of its 134 minutes I could not have easily dispensed with.