In Any Language, the Kindergarten Teacher is Creepy

The Kindergarten Teacher  (2015)

Directed by Nadar Lapid

Kino Lorber Films, 119 minutes, In Hebrew and English

Not-rated (full frontal nudity, disturbing themes)

★★

Boston Globe film director Ty Burr recently wrote of films that were, in his estimation, unjustly overlooked. My viewing of the Israeli film The Kindergarten Teacher makes Mr. Burr 0-1. Although the film features a stunning performance from the actress Sarit Larry, The Kindergarten Teacher needs to go back to nursery school.

The film centers on Nira (Ms. Larry), who is a beloved and creative kindergarten teacher. At 40-something she’s also suffering from a midlife crisis. Her kids are grown, her husband (Lior Raz) has morphed into a doughy slob, and she seeks to rekindle her passions in a poetry class, but her verse is as limp as the rest of her life. In essence, Nira is on autopilot. She is jarred to attention when she notices that one of her pupils, 5-year-old Yoav (Avi Shnaidman), has a strange tic. Yoav suddenly becomes vacant-eyed, prances back and forth rapidly, and recites original poetry. He doesn’t even know some of the words in his poems and can’t explain how they come to him or what they mean. Neither Nira nor Yoav’s nanny Miri (Ester Rada) know what to think, but each appropriates his words—Nira for her poetry class and Miri as a backdrop for acting auditions.

Is Yoav the poetry parallel to Mozart, a child prodigy whose creative gifts unwrap before his mind is fully developed? Is it some sort of brain disorder such as Tourette syndrome or glossolalia? When Nita’s poetry teacher (Gilles Ben-David) begins to praise Nira’s pilfered poems, she develops an obsession with Yoav that borders on unrequited psychosexual pedophilia. She finagles Miri’s dismissal to eliminate her access to Yoav’s genius, and seeks to convince his father Amnon that Yoav’s gift needs to be nurtured. Amnon, though, is an arrogant and despotic upscale restaurateur who tells Nira that he will do nothing to promote such a frivolous pursuit and envisions a far more practical course for his son. He even forbids Nira from encouraging Yoav, and pulls him out of her school when he learns she has disobeyed that order. This leads Nira to a desperate act.

This story is overlaid with Israeli racial tension. There has long been a split within Israel between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, the former whose ties go back to Northern and Western Europe and the latter to the Iberian Peninsula, Anatolia, and North Africa. It manifests itself physically in that Ashkenazi Jews tend to lighter-skinned and Sephardim are darker hued. In The Kindergarten Teacher, Sephardim such as Nira and Miri are cast as more vulnerable to the opinions and power of Ashkenazi such Nira's poetry teacher or Amnon. This racial theme is juxtaposed with that of the poet as a misunderstood outsider easily crushed by indifference, commerce, and tyrants.

The good things in this film can be summed in a single name: Sarit Larry. Hers is an astonishing physical presence. She isn’t exactly beautiful—adjectives such as handsome or striking work better—yet it is hard not to look at her when she’s on the screen. Her every move is a combination of grace and deliberation. Even her resignation and ennui are elegant. The bad is pretty much everything else: a moth-eaten script, unexplained motives, and creepy situations that take us the very edge of the unforgiveable before backing off ever so slightly. It’s ultimately hard to determine whether one should be saddened or outraged. While I am often a fan of cinematic ambiguity, this film drifts too close to darker human impulses for my comfort level.

All of this begs the question of why there was a U.S. remake of this film. American film companies often do near shot-by-shot remakes of foreign films in the belief that American moviegoers won’t watch subtitles. Such films are almost always flops, in part because there are cultural differences that simply don’t translate well stripped of their context. To pick just one example, Israeli kindergarten teachers have levels of physical contact between teachers and students that would be prosecuted in America.  In 2018, Netflix released an English-language version of The Kindergarten Teacher directed by Sara Colangelo and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as Lisa Spinelli. I guess Nira was too Jewish for Netflix, but no matter; it’s the same film shortened by 29 minutes. I’ve not seen it and have no plans to do so. Colangelo won a director’s award at Sundance, but the Netflix film hasn’t played much outside of film festivals. From where I sit, that’s not a tragedy. Call me squeamish, but The Kindergarten Teacher in any language is an inappropriate lesson plan.

Rob Weir