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Showing posts from April, 2019

THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. Dir. Sara Colangelo. 2018.

In this story of transgression and loss, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lisa, a dedicated, kindly teacher of 5 year olds. She yearns for creative expression and attends a poetry evening class but is frustrated with her writing. One of the children in her class, Jimmy, begins to pace back and forth across the classroom speaking lines whilst in an apparent trance, as though he is channelling words of an experienced wisdom beyond his years. His poetic nature excites her as he speaks from feeling rather than from thinking, or over thinking, as she does with her own attempts at poetry. Lisa fixates on his words, racing to scribble down every utterance, to capture his lines before they are lost forever. However, it is troubling that, at her evening class, she presents one of his poems as her own work. It is well received, and she repeats this theft of creative copyright and intellectual property the following week. The film suggests that her own latent talent was crushed by the everyday,