Die Lehrerin (2019)
Directed by Denis Dercourt

Film Review

Since he made his directing debut twenty years ago with his whimsical comedy-drama Les Cachetonneurs (1998), Denis Dercourt has taken us down an increasingly dark road with a series of fascinating but deeply unsettling studies on the perversities of human nature.  His most successful films so far - La Tourneuse de pages (2006) and Demain dès l'aube (2008) - both offer chilling explorations of obsession, and Chair de ma chair (2013) takes us into even grimmer territory with its portrait of a cannibalistic serial killer.

With his latest and most off-kilter film, Die Lehrerin, Dercourt takes the concept of huis close cinema to its extreme, with an ultra-minimalist drama focused on the sadomasochistic relationship that develops between an immigrant and a German language teacher.  The director made the film immediately after turning out a number of episodes of the Franco-German series Deutsch-les-Landes for Amazon Prime and lacks the polish of his earlier work.

The main point of interest of this low-budget offering is the extraordinary rapport that develops between the two characters in the run of a seemingly innocuous course of private tuition.  Playing the leads are Julia Franzke and Olivier Dovergne, two charismatic performers who convincingly enact a weird master-servant game (oddly without sex) that is intensely compelling, in spite of a script that looks as if it should have gone through at least another three or four re-writes before going in front of the camera.  Dercourt claims he was inspired for this film by Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).

Working with a tighter production schedule and a massively reduced budget may have felt like a worthwhile innovation at the time but the results are not overly impressive.  The film's rough and ready feel will no doubt make it a harder sell than Dercourt's previous films, although it does have a hard to pin down appeal.  Flawed as it is with its occasional longueurs and somewhat phoney dialogue, Die Lehrerin still manages to hold your attention.

The deliberately pared back mise-en-scene allows the two leads to take control of the film in a way that is pretty rare these days.  Mesmerising us with their enigmatic personas, both actors bring a dangerous edge to their performances. With this film, like some demonic alchemist from the Middle Ages, Dercourt is able to distil the infernal essence of his previous cinematic offerings into a residue of sickly malignancy.  What he does with this next is anyone's guess - just don't expect it to engender a musical comedy.

Film Synopsis

On his arrival in Berlin, a young immigrant is seized by a burning desire to start learning German.  He has no difficulty finding a teacher willing to help him in this endeavour, but she has a very peculiar method of instruction. In the course of his education, the immigrant allows himself to become an instrument in his teacher's increasingly perverse game of control and manipulation...