Monday, September 9, 2013

A Teacher




A friend and I put together a Scandalous Saturday double feature of "A Teacher" and "Adore." "A Teacher" stars newcomers Lindsay Burdge and Will Brittain as Diana Watts, a young high school teacher, and Eric Tull, the student with whom she conducts a sexual affair.

Director Hannah Fidell errs badly by starting her story after Diana and Eric have already begun relations; we need to understand how they got together (how she allowed them to get together), and feel that that part of the story would be more compelling than anything that follows. We know what a horny teenage guy would get out of such a relationship, but never get inside Diana's mind, though Fidell must think that long tracking shots of Burdge jogging (to increasingly insistent tom-toms as the risk of being found out heightens) do the trick, because she uses at least three of them. "A Teacher" flirts with interesting ideas in the development of a young man's sexual persona, as when Eric orders Diana to take her clothes off or to give him road head. But Fidell drops these themes in favor of conventional will-she-get-caught plotting with which a better film would not even have concerned itself.

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