1.
The Kindergarten Teacher
2018, Sara Colangelo

A remake of an Israeli movie by Nadav Lapid, this is a very powerful piece of cinema.

Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the kindergarten teacher of the title, is very good at her job. But she's also obviously deeply unsatisfied with the life she's leading. She's an aspiring poet, and is attending a class. But her teacher is underwhelmed by her efforts, and her (kind but somewhat stolid) husband really struggles to think of anything to say about them. Her teenage kids are archetypal teenage kids, self-absorbed and ungrateful. She finds the society she lives in superficial and uninspiring.

So, when one of her charges, the five-year-old Jimmy (Parker Sevak), comes out with lines that make a very creditable piece of poetry, she goes above and beyond the call of duty -- ultimately, WAY above and beyond -- to nurture his talent. She lectures his nanny, contacts his uncle and father (with whom she makes few inroads), wakes him up from nap time to share thoughts and evoke observations, gives him her phone number so that he can immediately share the poems that arise, apparently spontaneously, in his mind, calls him up herself, and generally breaches boundary after boundary as her obsession grows.

Viewers are liable (or at least we did) to go off down two blind alleys. First, you're preoccupied with whether the child is getting his stuff from somewhere else (he isn't). Then, when Lisa starts to present Jimmy's work in class, passing it off as her own, you start to think it's just going to be about plagiarism and come-uppance. But that's not it either. In fact, the denouement is hastened precisely by her decision to coach Jimmy to perform his own work onstage at a poetry recital. He does a good job. But there is a cascade of reactions. Jimmy's admission that his first little poem, about the beautiful Anna, was inspired by Lisa's assistant at kindergarten goes through Lisa like a lightning bolt. Meanwhile, Lisa's poetry teacher (who previously -- fired by her new-found poetic voice -- had initiated a brief fling with her) is now back in aloof disappointment mode, and expels her from the class. And Jimmy's father is furious, and transfers his son to a different educational establishment.

From which Lisa kidnaps him... She drives them out of town, takes him swimming, and settles him down in her cabin.

All of which becomes more and more uncomfortable to watch. There's nothing physically inappropriate (and again the gender roles here somehow make the scenario somewhat less scary than it would have been in reverse), but even so, it's very clear Lisa has totally lost the plot.

Jimmy's smart and proactive, though. He locks her in the bathroom, and tries to call for help (and in one of the movie's rare funny moments, Lisa hears that he's going about it wrongly, and shouts advice through the door on how to alert the police...). Then, as Lisa is hauled away, Jimmy announces to the police officer who's accompanying him: "I have a poem." Yeah, well, good luck with that, kiddo. Nobody cares...

The conveying of which point is the movie's major success. Lisa obviously made a series of increasingly bad decisions. But the fact remains that without some kind of support and encouragement, his talent is very likely to just wither and die.

And despite her disastrous choices, you feel terrible for Lisa... As Kayti Burt puts it, "It's easy for Lisa's turmoil to go unnoticed, in great part because it is Lisa's 'job' to be the one who notices and deals with emotional upheaval, the one who rubs her students' backs when they are struggling or forgives her own children when they say something unfeeling without thinking. There is no other character well-equipped by our culture to do the same for Lisa. She only has us viewers as allies, and that is a terrible tragedy that makes for a very good, extremely unsettling film."


Talented kids in Sri Lanka, 2010

I found it interesting that the movie-makers commissioned real poets to write the poetry. Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong wrote Jimmy's poems, following instructions to use the kind of language that would be accessible to a five-year-old, and Dominique Townsend wrote Lisa's.

It was a bizarre brief for Townsend, of course. The first draft she wrote was too good to be plausible, so she had "to revise the verses to make them worse". As she describes it, "It was like, 'We love your work, and also can you write for this woman who is dying inside and feeling strangled and is a mediocre writer?' That was a strange prompt to receive, to write a bad haiku about flowers."

Akbar was initially incredulous about the proposal -- "[I was] reading in bed, and I got this email on my phone from Maggie Gyllenhaal and I looked at it and said, 'This certainly isn’t real'" -- but then he found the project really interesting: "It was almost like translating... It was this really awesome, fun game to play."

Ocean Vuong has been on my radar for a while (and has now rocketed up my reading list). Examples of the poems he wrote for the movie can be found here.

Vuong's own experience also throws light on the question of whether a five-year-old could have written lines like these, which are simple but resonant. His family fled from Viet Nam to the United States when he was two, and during his early years he was surrounded only by the Vietnamese language. Nicole Chung writes: "He began learning English when he went to kindergarten. In fourth grade [ie, aged 9-10], he wrote his first poem, which he was accused of plagiarizing -- his teacher didn't believe he could have written it. But after that, he noticed, the teacher began to pay attention to him, occasionally helping him type his assignments on the school computer. 'I learned that putting the DNA of my mind on paper had garnered this white man's respect,' he recalls. 'I felt incredibly dangerous and powerful.'" (There's more detail on this incident here.)

Nadav Lapid is also said to have written poems when he was Jimmy's age...

So, yes, I remain unclear about the poetic abilities of five-year-olds. And I remain unclear, too, about the implications of Jimmy's ethnicity (he is of South Asian descent). Candice Frederick feels it's problematic ("this film's main character exploits a child of color -- and no one talks about it"), and I'm learning not to just dismiss such concerns by arguing that his ethnicity doesn't matter, because it always somehow does...



2.
Delfin
2019, Gaspar Scheuer

Delfin (Valentino Catania) is an 11-year-old Argentinian who would have benefited from (a more moderate version of) Lisa's encouragement... He plays the French horn (or at least a precursor of that instrument), and when he sees the announcement of an audition for a youth orchestra, he is determined to have a go.

The obstacles are formidable, however. Delfin (so named because his now absent mother yearned for the boundlessness of the ocean) lives with his dad (Cristian Salguero). They're poor. Dad is constantly being badgered to pay off a debt he owes, and Delfin works a bakery delivery round before going to school.

He also needs to borrow an instrument (at home he practises on a contraption made from a garden hose), and while his music teacher is supportive, the administrative powers-that-be seem deaf to his applications. And he needs to get to Junin (50 km away), which involves persuading his father to borrow money for the journey, and also to accompany him. Dad manages to inveigle himself an advance -- and promptly drinks most of it. Come the glorious day, he's in no fit state to go anywhere. So Delfin sets off by himself, with dad -- eventually -- in anxious pursuit.

Delfin doesn't even get as far as playing his instrument. His inability to read music means he falls even before the first fence, and the gap between creativity and poverty has claimed another victim.

But the adventure catalyses something in the father-son team. "You said we'd only be here for a short time," Delfin scolds his father, "and we've been here for three years." Their living conditions certainly don't correspond to his name, with its evocation of the sea and navigation and travel: "If his name is a brand, Delfin does not exist to live constrained in that way." So the end of the movie sees them moving on. A new chapter is beginning. Let's hope they'll meet with more success (although it probably wasn't a good idea to take the horn with them...)

Argentina (unlike Iran for example) has not produced many child-centric movies. But Scheuer grew up in Los Toldos, the small town in the province of Buenos Aires where the movie is filmed, and in some ways it can be seen as a representation of his own boyhood aspirations.

I was conscious of a little disorientation with regard to the time period. It seemed modern and yet not modern... Scheuer has this to say: "There were comments about the script to the effect that the world that was shown no longer exists. Although the film is contemporary, the protagonist tries to recreate a time that perhaps has more to do with my childhood in the late 1970s than the one experienced by children now exposed to the internet or online games. The film does not try to be a portrait of what childhood is like today in a town, but rather is a story of a singular character."

Juan Pablo Cinelli also has an interesting way of describing the tone: "Delfin [the movie] tries to navigate between the fantasy of an idealized, [Giuseppe] Tornatore-style childhood, a naive costumbrismo, and that moderately dingy rural realism in which a large part of Argentine film-making, no longer exactly new, is steeped. The combination produces something that could well be defined as magical realism 'ma non troppo'."

Some critics (Cinelli, for instance, and Weisskirch) take issue with the plot-lines that go nowhere (Delfin has a crush on one of the young teachers at school, for example, and has mixed experiences with his schoolmates, who sometimes include him in their little expeditions, and sometimes bully him), but to me these little details all contributed to the picture that was being built up. And we wouldn't have wanted the school-mistress to turn into a kind of Lisa...