L'institutrice

"The Kindergarten Teacher (2014 release from Israel; 120 min.) brings the story of Nira, a kindergarten teacher, and Yoav, a 5 yr. old boy in her class. As the movie opens, we see Nira talking to her husband about the remarkable gift the boy has, spewing poetry at any given time. The boy's nanny confides that she is using the boy's poets at her auditions. Meanwhile, Nira and the boy grow ever closer. To tell you more would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: this is the second movie from up-and-coming writer-director Nadav Lepid, who previously brought us "Policeman". In the DVD extras, he discloses in an interview that the story is mostly auto-biographical, to my surprise. Turns out that Lepid as a young boy went around proclaiming poetry out of nowhere. As to the relationship between Nira and the boy, once it becomes clear how protective she feels about the boy, the only question that remains is how far she will take it... The two main characters are portrayed beautifully by Sarit Larry as Nira, and even more impressive is Avi Schnaidman as the young boy. In the director's interview in the DVD bonus materials, he explains how they went about casting for the role of the young boy.

I don't think this movie ever saw a US theatrical release 9and if it did, it never came to Cincinnati), which is a darn shame. I picked this up while browsing the foreign movie section at my local library. I continue to be impressed with the quality of movies coming out of Israel. For such a small country, they sure do have some great movies. If you are in the mood for a high-quality "all talk, no action" movie, you cannot go wrong with "The Kindergarten Teacher".

Nira (Sarit Larry), a kindergarten teacher for fifteen years, is stunned when Yoav (Avi Shnaidman), her five-year-old student, announces in school, "I have a poem." The poem consists of only five lines, but the teacher finds magic in the words that the boy has seemingly just created while walking back and forth in the play area as if in a trance.

"Hagar is beautiful enough Enough for me Enough for me Gold rain falls over her house. It is truly the sun of god."

Brilliantly shot in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem by Shai Goldman, The Kindergarten Teacher, Israeli director Nadav Lapid's (Policeman, 2011) second feature, can be seen as a representation of an Israeli society where poetic sensibility has become lost in a culture that glorifies materialism, and where even the idealistic have lost their moral compass. A strangely affecting and disturbing film, The Kindergarten Teacher is at times perverse but also has moments of haunting beauty.

When Nira becomes convinced that Yoav is a poetic genius, comparable in her mind to the four-year-old Mozart, she become obsessed with a desire to protect him from an uncaring father (Yehezkel Lazarof), a wealthy restaurateur, and a mother who has taken off with a lover, but soon begins to cross the line between teaching the boy about life and protecting him from it. On the surface, Nira is a caring person, but the first hint that not all is right is when she passes off Yoav's poems as her own in her weekly poetry class, but fires Yoav's nanny Miri, (Ester Rada) when she learns that Miri also uses the boy's poems in her acting auditions.

Gradually, we begin to suspect that Nira sees the world only in terms of black and white, where there are no shades of gray or room for complexity. Lapid puts Nira's worldview in a larger context, "Israel society," he says "has developed a hermetic way of looking at the world, and it justifies everything, like we are the victims, and we are in permanent danger, and it creates a perfect order." When Nira leads the class in the Hanukah song, Mi Yimalel, which says that "In every age, a hero or sage came to our aid," the feeling is that Nira, the wife of a husband (Lior Raz) who watches game shows on TV, and the mother of a son serving in the military, sees herself as a present day Judas Maccabeus, an unlikely hero who will rescue Yoav from a world that is out to rob him of his individuality and sensitivity.

Lapid compares Nira's story to going to war "against a society that sanctifies profit, gain, richness, materialism," a society in which "the radical's rebellion suffers from the same diseases they try to heal, which is always the tragedy, and the inevitable destiny of the one who goes to war with his time." Nina's Christ-like decision to save Yoav from what she sees is his inevitable fate mirrors her own feelings of being the victim of a world where poets are anachronistic and sensitive souls are rejected. Like Christ, she is willing to suffer for other's sins, but does not seem capable of reflecting on the true meaning of grace.

Although we felt it didn't quite succeed, even on its own terms IMHO, "The Kindergarten Teacher" is still very watchable. The dour social criticism—poetry no longer has a place in the state of Israel!—didn't really speak to us, though the satirical portraits of the PC haters in Nira's poetry class and the weirdos at the poetry slam were quite amusing, in a depressing way.

The main storyline, Nira's relationship with the chubby-cheeked prodigy, Yoav, gets your attention right away and really builds; our main complaint was that Yoav's character seems inconsistent—he's withdrawn and suspicious at first (and rightly so!), then suddenly turns trusting and confiding, without any real transition. (Maybe he just realizes he's found a new amanuensis to copy down his poems; we, on the other hand, were sorry to see the last of Israeli singing star Ester Rada, who plays Yoav's nanny, Miri.)

Another plausibility problem, at least judging by the subtitles, is that even the best read five-year-old could never have composed the poems he recites ("banality"? really?)… The plot line got a little too cryptic for our taste as well—there's a teasing suggestion that Yoav's poems were actually written by Miri, another that he's channeling in verses recited by his uncle years before—and there are a couple of episodes meant to illustrate the, as it were, banality of Nira's life that seem like filler, but writer/director Nadav Lapid pulls it all together in the almost wordless final scene, set in a glitzy Sinai resort, that really makes it clear what Nira's nutty mission was all about.

I kind of expected that this movie would not bother me as much as the American remake, because I watched the remake first and knew what to expect this time. However, I was wrong. This version of The Kindergarten Teacher is basically the exact same story with only a handful of differences, so it still made my skin crawl. Watching this woman make all the wrong decisions about how to behave with a student was infuriating yet again. However, this version feels more stark and lifeless. A big reason for that is Sarit Larry who I don't think is a very strong actress, as she doesn't bring much emotion to her performance. And I'm comparing the film to one featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal (a very good actress,) so naturally this version is going to feel a bit weak in comparison. I also struggled a bit with the poems in this version. It's possible something is lost in the translation, but some of the language used by this 5-year-old kid is way too advanced. Again, I do recognize that it could be a translation misstep or even a cultural difference, but I wouldn't expect a child of that age to even know some of these words, let alone use them effectively in a poem. The poems they utilized in the American version had a beauty to them, but only contained words that a child of that age would know. To sum up, while the remake is a movie I hated because of how awkward and uncomfortable it made me feel while watching, the original The Kindergarten Teacher was even worse. I can't see myself recommending this version of the film to anyone.

An odd exploration of art and artist, The Kindergarten Teacher's most notable contribution may be its camerawork...which is almost a character in and of itself. The plot lags, the characters perplex, but the questions persist. It is not a flawless film, but it sure is interesting. And hard not to watch.