Day Off, through its children, likes to think of itself as a bitter-sweet portrait of our time, as was in its own way, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows forty years ago.
From Tuesday night till Thursday morning, school pupils live the story of their lives, which is the story of our world. They go home to their ‘families’: traditional, broken up, single-parented, restructured – in a word, the families of today.
It’s into this crazy, crazy, crazy world that the school administrator entrusts his flock. It comes as no surprise that it would have been better if he’d left the parents in the children’s care.