A Teacher

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.

We don't get to know the characters in this film. Hannah Fidell gives us no back story and no resolution. If you feel as nervous about the epidemic of teacher-student sexual abuse as I do, "A Teacher" won't leave you feeling any better.

"A Teacher" is not the cheap outrage movie I thought it might be. It is not full of raunchy sex. There is no violence to. The director attempted a psychological treatment of the perpetrator. She succeeds, but she doesn't surprise me.

Lindsay Burdge plays Diana Watts, a 30-ish high school English teacher with a lost lamb demeanor and a family crisis she is trying to avoid. Diana is not the Pam Smart sultry seductress with wicked intentions. She girl-next-door attractive, but she is depressed. I empathized. I wanted to help her find her way.

Diana has roommates and friends who ask her out to parties where she has the opportunity to meet guys, but she's so insecure she cannot really connect with her peers. Diana's ex-husband and her brother try to get her attention about issues in the family, but Diana is too confused deal with them.

How did a nice girl like Diana end up with that creep? Hidell leaves it up to us to guess.

Will Brittain plays Eric Tull, a hot high school jock from a rich family. Eric is the dominant one in the relationship. Eric decides he is going to take Diana to his father's ranch. Eric decides when they are going to have sex.

The sex depicted is not explicit, but Hidell makes it plain it is joyless for Diana. Eric is a bonehead. He doesn't read when Diana is feeling sad an anxious. He doesn't care. Eric's job is stud service. He could get any girl in school he wanted. It seems he thinks Diana should be grateful to HIM for a quickie in the parking lot!

Eric comes across as a bit old for high school. This often happens when directors cast 25-year-old hunks to play high school students. However, Hidell does a deft job in show us how Eric is not quite a man yet. Diana isn't able to convey to Eric the high risk of their relationship. Eric is not able to see the situation as an adult and exercise good judgment. He's just an over privileged Texas boy playing with daddy's toys and diddling his English teacher.

I wanted to see something bad happen to Eric. I wanted to see something good happen to Diana. I wanted a comforting answer as to why so many pretty, young teachers have sex with their students. However, Hidell does't just come out and give me what I want.

Apart from awkward camera work and the stop-and-go jumpiness from one seen to the next, Hidell does a good job with what she has. She doesn't try to emulate the Hollywood blockbusters. She doesn't make her actors punch above their weight, which steers the film away from b-movie movie ham.

I felt voyeuristic. It might have been me and my camera following Diana around. The absence of backstory or subplots gave me an undiluted taste of a perilous episode in Diana Watts' life.

The drawback of Hidell's cinema vérité is I found no redemption for Eric. I just hated him. However, Eric is the victim. Not Diana. Diana is the adult. Diana is the one breaking her contract, lying to her employers, and eroding society's trust. Yet, Hidell is telling me I must empathize with Diana, and I do. Perhaps Hidell is saving the tears of Eric for "A Teacher II."

This is a film in A Teacher that is nudging itself, trying to be set free from the restraints and the shortcomings of the finished product. The film trying to break free is a deep, involved character study on a teacher-student relationship that functions because of deep conversation and a mutual understanding between parties. The film we get is an interesting albeit mostly flat examination of an unremarkable teacher-student affair that strides along with sporadic hardships and ends in predictable calamity.

Hannah Fidell wanders into mumblecore territory here, as she directors and pens the film about Diana Watts (Lindsay Burdge), a high school English teacher, in her thirties or so, who has been flirting and hanging around with student Eric Tull (Will Brittain). The two hang out frequently - mostly in each others homes so being spotted in public isn't possible - and both enjoy each others company, personality, and intimacy. It doesn't take long, however, for Diana's paranoia to nearly get the best of her, as she tries to keep their relationship closeted, even as Eric begins to turn the other cheek to her at some points.

Immediately, this is a story that needs to be told, and this film ostensibly will humanize and maybe justify a teacher-student relationship. However, Fidell unfortunately keeps things too heavily nuanced to be insightful and too subtle to evoke much commentary or humanity. There isn't much to Diana or Eric, and their relationship seems more existent because it's a taboo and it's not normative. There's no real indicator on why they're together in the first place. We don't see why Eric has captured her eye, as he is just a typical, faceless high school teenager that comes to class everyday, does his work, and is quietly anxious sexually. There's no justification as to why Diana would want to date a student, or Eric in particular, seeing as if someone found out it could irreparably scar her reputation and put her out of a job.

The film I was hoping A Tacher would be featured extensive dialog to develop each character, dialog in the way of both of them talking about why they like each other enough to carry out a dangerous relationship under the noses of classmates and the school administration, and had deeply intimate, satisfying sex. This would be a four star film. The film we have here is one with minimal dialog in the way of characters, a shallow, limited view on why these two would want to be together, and relatively simple sex scenes captured by a grim camera that knows no color scheme other than black or very, very gray.

Having said all this, the film does in fact feature a strong lead performance by Lindsay Burdge, whose teacher character is made a sympathetic character, even with out much develop towards her. We can see that she thinks something of this relationship - whatever that may be - and she would be pained deeply if something wrong were to happen with it. If the film didn't have Burdge at the center, at least trying to provide some sort of clarity the character's motivations in this relationship, this would've been a complete misfire.

A Teacher is a serviceable, but overly-simple look at a subject that needs strong care and attention to be made human. The characters should've been more identifiable, the sex should've been more powerful and shocking considering the age gap, and the drama should've been thicker. The only thing I thought A Teacher was doing, by the end of it, was simply trying to push transgressive boundaries for the sake of doing so; not because it had something genuinely enlightening or strong to say.

Starring: Lindsay Burdge and Will Brittain. Directed by: Hannah Fidell.

Step 1: Turn on any Lifetime movie with "Teacher" or "Student" in the title. Step 2: Start watching around the 15 minute mark. Step 3: Turn it off 20 minutes before the ending.

You have now seen "A Teacher". No character development, no resolution.

Not worth the time.

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.