A Teacher

I usually really don't care much about the soundtrack in a movie, but in this one I noticed how bad it is. It was like from a horror movie. I usually like slow movies and movies with only 2 characters, but this one was just pointless. The story was going nowhere, we didn't learn anything about the characters, their motives, and so on. There was also not much chemistry between the main characters, which for me is probably the most important part in a romantic movie. What's up with that family scene? It lead us nowhere. What's up with all those unnecessary running scenes? They are just a filler. How about some dialogue or a plot? Character development? Anything? If you want to see a good romantic movie with low budged, but that is emotional and interesting, go watch "Blue Jay" and skip this one.

Director Hannah Fidell got the idea of the movie Teacher while she worked at a restaurant waitress and was attracted to a young patron. She wondered how this would happen to a teacher. We often hear of older men and younger women, but how about the older woman, younger man? In A Teacher, Diana is a teacher at a suburban Texas high school. She has a strain relationship with her family and has few intimate friends. She crosses the lines and begins a sexual affair with a student Eric. In it, she is taken away to reignite the excitement of youthful lust and adapts to the world of quickies, sexting, and fantasy of her young suitor. Besides the ethical dilemma, she is carried away to continue this fantasy to a point of no return. This movie does a good job to show the humanity of Diana who simply craves emotional intimacy that she blocks from the thick wall around her. I saw this film as part of the Atlanta Film Festival.

So I guess instead of a real script, it's easier to have 4 intimate scenes in 20 minutes?! So much pointless filler, like her family issues. Then there was the soundtrack... It's difficult for this subject matter to be really boring, But they pulled it off.

What it does better is capture the joylessness of abuse. I liked that Diana's homelife was a share house rather than a marriage gone stale (as in the series). Also less glamourised.

Coming in at 75 minutes, if it were any shorter it would have been a TV Pilot, but if it were any longer I would have hated it.

An interesting dive into the mind and emotion of a female teacher who has a sexual relationship with one of her students. Lindsay Burdge, the actress playing the teacher, did an excellent job for most of the movie at being seemingly normal, but obviously mentally unstable. Near the last third of the movie however, she seemed to cross the line of believable and over the top a few too many times for me.

The approach of the movie was interesting in that we start well into their relationship, as the teacher's life starts to unravel. The time span of when the movie took place was relatively short, and the movie focused more on her and her emotions than it did on the relationship, which I really liked.