The Teacher review – a won­der­ful cin­e­mat­ic experience

The Teacher asks us to con­sid­er the sac­ri­fices we would make for our fel­low man in times of cri­sis. It demon­strates the unre­solve­able moral dilem­mas which mark the lives of so many suf­fer­ing through con­flict and, despite being a lit­tle mud­dled in places, elo­quent­ly assess­es the pri­mal aspects of the human con­di­tion when warped by grief.

Set in the West Bank, Farah Nabulsi’s debut fea­ture fol­lows Pales­tin­ian school teacher Basem (Saleh Bakri) as he attempts to rec­on­cile his life­long com­mit­ment to polit­i­cal resis­tance with his role as father-fig­ure to one of his most promis­ing stu­dents, Adam (Muham­mad Abed Elrah­man). When Adam’s old­er broth­er Jacoub (Mah­mood Bakri) is mur­dered by an Israeli set­tler, Basem is forced to come face-to-face with his own past, Adam’s white-hot lust for revenge, the unbear­able uncer­tain­ty of war and his own che­quered past.

Nabul­si expert­ly demon­strates the pre­car­i­ous every­day of occu­pa­tion as a sense of unpre­dictabil­i­ty sim­mers through­out. Pales­tine feels tan­gi­ble through the screen – we stand shoul­der to shoul­der with char­ac­ters as they sift through the rub­ble of a demol­ished home or day­dream in a class­room. One par­tic­u­lar high­light comes from a short sequence of Basem walk­ing through a mar­ket, stalls adored with Pales­tin­ian flags, the cam­era hold­ing on street sell­ers’ faces. These slow-motion por­traits of char­ac­ters look­ing direct­ly into the cam­era could be clichéd, but instead are weight­ed with his­to­ry and intrigue as look­ing into the eyes of those whose lives have been for­ev­er altered by occu­pa­tion, is unde­ni­ably powerful.

Oth­er plot strands, such as a roman­tic digres­sion between Basem and an Eng­lish vol­un­teer at the school, Lisa (Imo­gen Poots) are how­ev­er marred by disin­gen­u­ous dia­logue and wres­tle to hold their own against the for­mi­da­ble main plot. While it’s com­mend­able for Nabul­si to aim to cre­ate a larg­er tapes­try of con­flict, Basem and Adam’s rela­tion­ship has this emphat­ic mag­net­ism which ren­ders all oth­er nar­ra­tives a lit­tle distracting.

An enthralling per­for­mance from Bakri mean­while ulti­mate­ly serves as the film’s back­bone. The immense weari­ness which comes from a life­time of strug­gling with the moral­i­ty of pol­i­tics and vio­lence has ren­dered our pro­tag­o­nist almost ghost-like, and the film seeks to draw him out from the com­fort of his book­shelves and into the real world once again.

Pater­ni­ty is also one of the cen­tral themes as the sto­ry of Basam’s son, who was incar­cer­at­ed for attend­ing a protest, runs par­al­lel to the sto­ry of an Amer­i­can sol­dier who is being held hostage by the resis­tance in the hope of a pris­on­er exchange. In per­haps the most chill­ing scene, Basam and the father of the Amer­i­can sol­dier, Simon (Stan­ley Townsend), come face-to-face for a des­per­ate exchange. There’s hope the meet­ing will result in some­thing akin to Al Paci­no and Robert De Niro’s infa­mous exchange in Heat yet this scene unfor­tu­nate­ly lacks the same raw inten­si­ty. We do come away from it, how­ev­er, with a fresh under­stand­ing of the far-reach­ing effects of occu­pa­tion which span gen­er­a­tions and break down the con­crete per­sonas of even the most sto­ic of fathers.

Grip­ping and full of ten­sion, The Teacher not only makes for a won­der­ful cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence, but pos­es some all-impor­tant ques­tions the wider world has seem­ing­ly avoid­ed answer­ing for too long.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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