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Passing For Straight?
By Chris Carpenter
School may be out for summer in many places, but The Country Teacher, from Film Movement, is just going to work. This Czech film about a sexually conflicted educator is scheduled for release in Southern California theaters on June 5.
It doesn’t take long for viewers to realize that new teacher Peter (a good performance by Pavel Liska) is a mysterious and possibly troubled man. He was on the faculty of a prestigious academy in Prague before suddenly resigning and relocating to a remote village. Given his credentials, he is quickly hired by the local principal, who doesn’t ask many questions about Peter’s past.
A natural sciences teacher, Peter imparts upon his pupils such lessons as “when we understand nature, we can better understand ourselves” and “diversity is sometimes a trap, and sometimes a gift; it depends on what we do with it.” More privately, however, he questions the existence of God.
Peter takes a room on a farm owned by Marie (Zuzana Bydzovska), who lives with her rebellious teenaged son (Ladislav Sedivy). At Marie’s encouragement, Peter takes her son under his wing as a tutor and gradually develops an “unprofessional” interest in the youth.
While the basic storyline of The Country Teacher sometimes is predictable, it also takes a number of surprising turns. Of note is Peter’s relationship with his parents and how his openness with them differs from his openness with contemporaries. He is more out to his father initially than to his mother, which is unique in the annals of gay cinema.
Peter goes through a lot as he strives toward greater integrity, and he puts Marie and her son through a lot, as well. The film’s final scene is a nice moment of reconciliation and rebirth between the three of them.
Writer-director Bohdan Slama, an accomplished filmmaker who’s not well known outside of Europe, has a good eye for both lyrical settings and the emotional damage wrought by repressed sexuality.
Also scheduled for theatrical release on June 5 is The Art of Being Straight (Regent Releasing/here!). The movie also will be available on here! Networks. The Art of Being Straight is the debut feature of young writer-director Jesse Rosen, who plays the film’s confused protagonist, Jon.
Having recently broken up with his girlfriend for undisclosed reasons, Jon relocates from Boston to Los Angeles for a fresh start. He moves in with an old college buddy and finds work as an administrative assistant at an advertising agency.
Jon says he’s straight and his behavior seems to support this, but things get complicated when his gay boss, Paul (Johnny Ray Rodriguez), takes an interest in him. At the same time, Jon’s ex-girlfriend-turned-lesbian, Maddy (Rachel Castillo), finds herself falling in love with the new guy next door. Are these young adults trying to define themselves gay? Straight? Bisexual? None of the above?
Rosen’s inexperience as a film director shows at times, especially during the movie’s murkily shot and occasionally confusing-edits during sex scenes, but his writing and acting are fine. Indeed, everyone in the cast is quite good.
“I made this film because there wasn’t a movie that I could relate to in terms of my own experiences and the experiences of many others in my generation,” Rosen stated in a press release. “Discovering your sexuality is not supposed to be about trying to decide into which box to fit despite what we tend to learn.”
While being straight or gay might not be an art, both The Country Teacher and The Art of Being Straight show that trying to figure ourselves out as human, sexual beings certainly remains a dramatic and — at times — entertaining endeavor.