A Teacher (2013)
A maddening movie that has some gutsy aspects. But there is so much depending on credibility in the character's motivations, you can't quite ever buy the plot.
Which is this: a high school teacher gets involved with one of her students. I know this happens now and then, often to national headlines, so that much I like. But we want to see the psychology of a teacher who would do that, and it isn't here. What the director and writer (and leading actress, to some extent) give us is a young woman who takes risks and is obsessed with the young man she begins having sex with. Big risks. Risks so absurd (like kissing him in the classroom after the other students have left) that you wonder if the movie makers had information that this was true, or if they were winging it with no good instincts about how people would act in this situation.
Not that it needs to be terribly rational. Obviously here is a case of a teacher losing track of her place in her job, in her life, and of the consequences ahead. The student we believe, just enjoying a good ride with a nutty teacher, somewhat sincere in his liking her but a little baffled by her obsession. I mean he's only a high schooler, and as much as they know a lot about a lot, they don't know about the convolutions of older people's ability to love, and the complications of that.
Anyway, there is a lot offered here and very little achieved. To some extent the last scene of the teacher lying on a borrowed bed sums up all of our feelings. Kind of, oh my god, oh my god. Yeah, of course. But with so much dangling and unexplored, this could have been a powerful, valuable, must see drama.
