Genre

You may have heard this one before. Annabelle (Erin Kelly, channelling Leelee Sobieski) is the hellraising daughter of a US Senator, sent to a Catholic girls’ school to be out of sight and out of trouble. Her rebellious ways continue, however, and she falls in love with her poetry teacher Simone (Diane Gaidry). Much angst, particularly on Simone’s part, ensues, not to mention inevitable walks on the beach and much Lilith Fair-style musical noodlings (our heroines would clearly die of shock if they had a run-in with Maria Beatty), before the consummation and the rather sudden ending of the movie arrive.

Kelly and Gaidry turn in good work, and succinctness of the storytelling keeps the viewer’s interest. There is a larger problem, though, than the movie’s rather overdone storyline and not-terribly-original narrative technique. In the making-of featurette, writer/director Katherine Brooks acknowledges the inspiration provided by Mädchen in Uniform, and how she had wished the student and teacher had gotten together in that film because that would have been “hot.” All right, so that makes this pic something a fantasy. Fair enough. But she also wants a real-world tie-in to all the stories in the news about teachers arrested for having sex with their students, only her take is sympathetic. This leads to some intellectual dishonesty. Having the student actively seduce the teacher is a neat but cheap cop-out from dealing with the unbalanced, predatory power dynamic such a relationship implies. Any truly ethical teacher would have run in a blind panic from a student making the advances Annabelle does, but Simone only utters one line at the end of the film to suggest that her many haunted looks might have been caused by the notion that what she is tempted to do might be wrong. I have this sense of the film trying to have things both ways, and it simply can’t. But even with these knocks against it, it remains a not unengaging romance.