Teachers and pedophiles – Newspaper Kommersant No. 173 (7374) of 09/20/2022

The San Sebastian International Film Festival continues. So far, two films have stood out from his competition program for their level and quality, which he talks about Andrey Plakhov.

The title of the first film can be translated as “Substitute”: it’s about a teacher of literature sent to replace another teacher in a problematic class of a problematic school in a problematic area of ​​Buenos Aires. Lucio (this is the name of the teacher) is problematic himself: he divorced his wife, has almost no personal life, and cannot influence his teenage daughter, who does not want to study. But he finds himself in his place in a situation where it is necessary, having shown courage, to wrest a capable boy from the clutches of the drug mafia. Along the way, explaining to him and all the other unfortunate students that literature, which, in their initial opinion, no one needs and is absolutely useless, is actually worth something.

In principle, a similar film (minus the plot with drugs) could have been filmed at the Soviet Gorky studio. Or in today’s Hollywood. But the Latin American version from director Diego Lerman is much better.

There is neither hypocrisy nor sentimentality in him, even when the line of relations between an adult son and a terminally ill father is drawn in this direction. The picture is shot and edited in a modern way and rises above the linear narrative due to the spontaneous and at the same time skillfully built pictoriality. Even the slums of the Argentine capital acquire volume and picturesqueness under the gaze of the camera.

The second movie is called “Sparta”: it was directed by the famous Austrian director Ulrich Seidl. Here it is no longer surprising that each frame is a work of modern art, because Seidl’s cinema was formed at the junction of his main trends. Another concern was whether the director would be able to avoid the problems that lay in wait for him in the previous picture “Rimini”? Her hero, a sweet-voiced singer who went into circulation, in the off season at an Italian resort, indulged his old fans with songs and sex. Periodically, the life of a battered gigolo was invaded by his fascist father, who lived out his days in a nursing home. Actor Hans-Michael Rehberg, who played the role of the father, died five years ago, the film was filmed and prepared for so long. As it turned out, not one, but two at once. Seidl managed to shoot the elderly artist also for the plot of Sparta, in the center of which is the second son of the dying man: this is how the dilogy about two brothers arose.

If Rimini is disproportionately built, drawn out and sinning with platitudes, Sparta shows Seidl at his best – sharp, polished and uncomfortable. The hero of this highly provocative story is a pedophile who suffers from his vice and tries to overcome it. He never crosses the line beyond which a criminal offense begins, but is not able to overcome the lust for boys of tender age. The actor Georg Friedrich, without a single close-up, exclusively in plastic language, conveys these painful states of his character with frightening persuasiveness.

He finds an abandoned school in a poor Romanian village and organizes free judo lessons for the surrounding boys. They are drawn to the new mentor and especially attached to him when he dresses the students in antique clothes, gives them names from Hercules to Apollo and plays out military rituals with cries of “Molon lave”. The “Sparta” fortress becomes an image of an impossible and illegal, but in its own way beautiful utopia. It is clear that a conflict with the boys’ parents is inevitable – not so much because of the sexual background of what is happening, but because of the fact that the newcomer violates tradition and way of life.

The paradox is that, having pulled the children out of the “embraces of a pedophile”, the fathers cannot offer them anything in return: the fate of the future “real men” in the Romanian hinterland is drunkenness, illiteracy and a dense home building.

Seidl leaves no optimistic illusions in the Austrian part of his narrative either. The decrepit inhabitants of an expensive nursing home in wheelchairs are, in fact, fragments of the Third Reich, and their children are psychologically broken perverts: one is a gerontophile, the other is a pedophile.

Even before the world premiere of the film, a discrediting campaign was launched against him at the suggestion of the Spiegel magazine: allegedly, during the filming, rights were violated and unbearable conditions were created for the children filmed there. The festival in Toronto, where this premiere was supposed to take place, was frightened at the last moment and canceled it. The director of the festival in San Sebastian, Jose Luis Rebordinos, on the contrary, showed firmness, saying that he would be ready to remove the scandalous picture from the program only by court order. Seidl did not come to the festival, notifying him of this by a special letter: the director preferred the film to speak for itself, without the mediation of biased commentators. And it looks like he is right: the festival audience met Sparta with enthusiasm and understanding.