Private Lessons (2009)

Touches You

Sadly Over-hyped

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The problem with this film is that it appears to have set out with the intention to be broadly exploitative about the wider questions concerning the nature of seduction, sexual awakening, discrimination , freedom and so forth.However the manipulative spectacle which governs the seduction of Jonas becomes so outrageous that it ends up becoming the central axis of anxiety that dominates the main thematics within the work. We slide quickly from ambitious reaching for parallels which involve evocations of idealised intellectual emancipation and a nod to ancient Greek love. Where do we end up ? Subsumed in uncomfortable realisations about the clumsy motives which lie behind the adult desires to which we are spectators. There unfolds a glaring itinerary of dubious motives.1. Jonas initially approaches his adult friends for help about a very specific issue (premature ejaculation) but far from helping him, they never identify the issue but rather use it to increase their grasp over the boy by introducing a confusing melange of pornographic speak. 2. The adult group effectively chase away Jonas' girlfriend presumably because she is not compliant with their intentions or power over Jonas. 3. We never actually see the scene where Jonas agrees to submit to a group sexual encounter. Because of this it is difficult to assess the moment he crosses over into their world and is entirely seduced. 4. When Pierre isolates Jonas and begins his own seduction the question which rises is whose pleasure is he really pre-occupied with ? The boy's own relationship with pleasure or Pierre's desire to sexually over- power the boy and fulfil his sexual conquest.Both Jonas and his girlfriend challenge the adult's power by backing away sharply at some point. The very fact of this awkwardness indicates a failure of Pierre and ultimately the adult group to transmit his/their noble sexual awakening project. The question arises, why did it fail or why was it so flawed in the end ?The abuse here is not strictly speaking outside the law and illegal so much as it is about the insensitivity of adults to the vulnerability and naivety of youth AS WELL AS to a notion of inter-relational abuse regardless of the issue of age. The adults violate their relation to Jonas when they use his problem with premature ejaculation to ensnare him as a candidate for sexual recreation within their group by not providing clear solutions for his needs but instead playing with him. They further abuse him by openly ridiculing the boundaries of his relationship with his girlfriend in what is an unforgivable act of adult manipulation. Finally Pierre abuses Jonas by offering a sexual experience that is closeted, furtive, rather squalid, lacking in a sense of fun and ultimately serving his own interests and this a a far cry from all the talk about the freedom of sexual pleasure as a form of self emancipation. It's a shame the film lost touch with what appears to be it's original broader potential. Had Jonas been seduced by someone who was more at ease with his sexuality, more playful, giving, indeed well adjusted as a feminine gay man, Jonas' seduction may well have been a positive portrayal of precisely the ideals Pierre harks on about. However the message of the film was in the end ambivalent concerning if it thought gay was OK as an option over and above a flawed notion of bisexuality devoid of emotional attachment which it was at odds to present to Jonas as the acceptable form of sexual fluidity. To this extent one had to wonder what Jonas had been taught in the end about sex, his body and power etc and if he had indeed missed out on a more effective awakening of sexual self knowledge which could have been experienced through more likable, well intentioned, wiser, better adjusted peers.

Although I can't say I liked this movie, I'm giving it a fairly high rating (six stars) because what it does it does very effectively. I had to keep reminding myself that the creeps in this movie are not real people, which means the ones who made it did a good job.Unlike some other reviewers, the sexual element didn't affect me much either way. I neither approve nor disapprove of unrelated adults coaching an effectively orphaned teenage boy in the arts and sciences of sex, any form of sex he's interested in experiencing. If he's old enough to do it, and if he's interested, then it's okay. If God hadn't wanted adolescents to be sexually active he could easily have designed them to mature sexually at a later age, but he didn't.But what does bother me a great deal in this movie is the extraordinarily selfish way the adults treat the adolescents. They are cruel, shallow, snide, petty and totally self-absorbed creeps, and they push their creepiness aggressively onto the emotionally vulnerable adolescents. That emotional abuse is what I find repellent. The fact that Jonas and Delphine are children (and they ARE children emotionally, even though they are not children physically) is almost incidental.Pierre, Nathalie and Didier are bullies, and if their victims had been people of any age, even people their own age who were less aggressively arrogant than they are - and even if the focus had been on something besides sex: on money or looks or physical fitness or social class or something else - their behavior would have been just as despicable as it was in this movie. They are bullies, and bullies are always despicable.But the creepiness is so pervasive and so effectively portrayed that the director and writers MUST have done it intentionally. We must be SUPPOSED to despise these people, and we do. So this movie is in the odd class of well made movies that are intentionally unpleasant to watch because they're about despicable characters. Dennis Hopper was in many movies like that.

Okay, this movie may not be everyone's cup of tea. Whichever way you look at it, the main theme is undeniably a one-sided sexual relationship between an overbearing adult and a naive and gullible adolescent boy. Jonas being "already" sixteen years of age may make sexual intercourse with him legally permitted, but the fact remains that there's a huge unbalance between the two of them: the adult party acting as a self-appointed teacher and as the last hope of Jonas' ambition to succeed for his final exams, while young Jonas is (or at least feels to be) totally dependent of Pierre. If Pierre had been his actual professor at school, he would without any doubt have risked expulsion because of sexual harassment. So Pierre could have known (and was intelligent enough to actually know) that he was wrong. It's only in the very end of the movie that the balance weighs a little bit back in favor of Jonas, who - with the sleek opportunism of his age- , sees that his knowledge of Pierre now gives him control over him and makes him get what he wants: a degree.This doesn't sound as a fun movie, and it isn't. It's appalling to witness the machinations of Pierre and his two equally adult friends, who very gradually but deliberately succeed in sexual corrupting Jonas. They make his first sexual experience with his (equally inexperienced) girlfriend into the favorite topic at the dinner table ("does she has a vaginal or a clitoral orgasm?"), with total disregard to Jonas' uneasiness on the subject, and at some point start to "teach" him the real stuff: making him witness them having sexual intercourse and giving him blow-jobs, in the process teaching him so many adult tricks that his girlfriend can't cope with it and shies away. It's all the more appalling because Jonas is a vulnerable child, with his parents divorced, he and his brother living with his mother but she's all the time away on some vague missions and the boys are totally on their own. Jonas does bad at school, his tennis doesn't work-out either and he feels like a total looser. And now he also feels like he's a looser with sex, because these adults make fun of him and his girlfriend backs off. As said before, it's only at the end of the movie that Jonas discovers that he can stand up for himself. If the choice he makes is morally a good one is questionable, apparently the director wants us to judge for ourselves.The acting in this movie is mostly strong, although these adults all three of them have a pompous way of delivering their lines, but maybe that's just to emphasize their deliberate and self-righteous character. But I was especially impressed with young Bloquet as Jonas, he seems like a natural and is totally convincing as the naive, slightly dumb but eager to learn, impressionable adolescent who outwardly shrugs away his problems rather than face or discuss them, but all the while subtly showing the inner turmoils and doubts he harbors. The actor cannot have been much older than the character he plays here, so it makes you wonder how he coped with all this.The direction calmly lets unfold the story by itself, there are no artistic mannerisms to distract the viewer; on the contrary, the direction is almost clinical and with that chillingly effective. The script is great. I loved the fact that we seem to step on board of a riding train and never get anything explained, so things only very gradually begin to dawn on you or just stay in the dark. What's Jonas' mother going away for? What is the role of his silent (older?) brother? How did he encounter Pierre and his friends and why does his mother trusts them so much to allow her son to spend so much time with them? It's like the script cut-off all the fringes to make the bleak story all the more visible. It's the same with the ending: we see Jonas finally getting his degree. But how things with Pierre will go from there on we don't learn. We will have to guess.To sum it up: it's an impressive and bold movie with a repulsive story and a questionable morale, that lingers in your head for a long time and can cause some serious discussion on the topics of sexual exploitation and opportunism. Movies like this, that shake you up rather than entertain you are not a bad thing at all.

In hedonistic France this is probably defined as a "family drama", rather as "sexploitation shock-cinema".Thumbs up for French cinema: it has actually managed to devolve from perennial underage-Lolita-seduces-middle-aged-man to middle-aged-man-seduces-boy scripts. Just as you thought decadence in French movies could not possibly get any worse than it's been in recent decades, comes EL, a movie that will have you vomiting for weeks.The basic plot: Jonas, a not-too-bright 16(?) year-old tennis hopeful (how many tennis hopefuls ARE bright?) is sent to the home of Pierre, a middle-aged intellectual wannabe, where Jonas learns maths, history, and how to receive oral sex from people two-to-three times his age.Pierre - the smelly society-loathing anarchist pervert who ogles him at every opportunity and indulges in lame, self-serving philosophical diatribes - quickly introduces two more smelly perverts in Jonas's life: Nathalie and Didier, an open-relationship orgy/swinger couple who treat sex as if it were a used chewing-gum. One look at those three and you'd run. But what does Jonas know about running? After all, he's just a tennis player... Very soon Jonas finds out that maths, history and nihilistic philosophical rants are not at the top of Pierre's passions, but that molesting boys tops all his lists by a long shot. He sneakily prepares Jonas for this delightful adolescence-ruining ordeal by first destroying the boy's relationship with his girlfriend (by having everyone at the dinner table openly snicker at her for her alleged sexual inadequacies), and then getting Didier and Nathalie to prepare Jonas for a world of sexual perversion by giving him oral sex while Jonas, the gullible schmuck that he is, sits there blind-folded, unaware that he's being set up by three very, very smelly perverts for a life of bisexuality involving older men and rather unappealing middle-aged women with big noses.In the end, Jonas predictably starts feeling rather gloomy about having regular catching sex with his 45 year-old pitching male teacher. To cheer Jonas up a bit and perhaps avert a suicide attempt or two, Pierre tells him the movie's final line of dialogue: "I never forced you to do anything you didn't want." That line must be what all pedophiles love to use after desecrating the body of a minor. (Right after "hey, you asked for it!".) Even worse than all the stench-drenched pedophilic shenanigans that transpire in EL is the writer's message to the (young?) viewer to "think for yourself (like Kami says you should)" which invariably means - at least in the context of this degenerate movie - that children are the hope of not just the world, but of all of the world's lusting pedophilic perverts. The movie can even be understood as a guide for emerging pedophiles: it offers useful seduction tips for all those losers who are sexually attracted to children. For example, leave porn tapes lying around the living room, the way Pierre does.Who financed this abhorrent trash? That notorious Dutch pedophile political party? Pierre is supposed to be a former tennis player. However, his skills are on par with the most talentless beginner imaginable. It was like watching a rhino play golf.Why would they cast Jonas, a kid who obviously knows hot to play, along with an "established ex-pro" who obviously can't swing a racket in any useful manner - except to accidentally hit himself over the head with it? Needless to say, the movie is also bad because it contains dozens of drawn-out scenes/moments when everything seems to move in slow motion. Yeah, the century-old affliction of Europe's pretentious "cinema del arte" i.e. junk cinema. "Arteaux means never having to rush, never having to edit the movie to make it compact hence interesting". Did Kami say that? From his grave, perhaps...AVOID.A certain reviewer has posted a comment here with the sole intention of "educating me". (Or so he claims in the laughable email he sent me.) Read his "wonderful" plea for child-molestation: it's poetic almost. And, no, the kid is 16, pal, not 18.To the other reviewer (the one who says "bro"): no, I didn't refer to the kid's tennis-playing abilities being under-par. I was talking about the adult pervert playing like a rank amateur. Read my text properly.