Undergirded by the suspicion that, like W.H. Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, The Kindergarten Teacher is past special pleading. In writer-director Nadav Lapid’s second feature, set in modern Israel, the scribblers who recite verse in workshops understand they will never persuade the moneymakers about the importance of their cause. So Nira, the eponymous heroine, pins her hopes on five-year-old Yoav, alone among his peers for the ability to generate poetry like a furnace does heat. It’s a pokey, unevenly paced movie whose main binary – commerce versus art – gets drawn in too bright colors, but it’s worth a watch for its strong sense of local geography and the opaque performance of Sarit Larry as Nira (which muddles the binary).
A woman with kind eyes and a voice as soft as baby powder falling on snow, Nira is the kind of teacher whose warmth is surrounded by steel wool. She gives her kind, dull husband affection and saves her love for her students. The first scene gets to the essence of The Kindergarten Teacher: while the husband laughs sullenly at crap TV, Shai Goldman’s camera follows Nira into a room and keeps a discreet distance while she works at a computer. Eventually the audience learns that Nira is a poet herself. Evoking memories of Sylvia Plath hurriedly scribbling poems before dawn and the rustling of selfish children, the scene sets up the moment when Yoav recites his first evocative bits. With the round, bland everychild face for stuffing cake into its mouth, Yoav doesn’t look particularly impressive, but the purity of his expression unsettles Nira, whose colleagues at the workshop are a dim lot (“I hate the indifference to slaughtering animals” is a typical response). But Lapid respects Yoav as a child. In the film’s kinetic scene, the camera breathlessly follows Yoav and a chum crawling up and descending a playground slide, over and over; and although Nira is watching them, whether the camera assumes her point of view is unclear. This ambiguity works – I want to respond to Yoav unmediated.
She can’t find any takers though. Yoav’s uncle, a writer himself with the face of a cinder block, warns her that Yoav’s restauranteur dad doesn’t go for this poetry shit. He’s right. Over drinks at his bar before opening, he rails against the losers and leeches blind to where the world is headed. Nira is undaunted. “He’s a poet in an era that hates poets,” she says to another character. Although The Kindergarten Teacher avoids allusions to geopolitics, the father’s attitude speaks to the fatalism of people who live under the impression that their neighbors will vaporize them (how serving food addresses this matter any better than writing poetry is a question above his pay grade). The erotic charge between them doesn’t go much of anywhere, nor does a tryst with her poetry teacher, in a sequence with the movie’s most didactic and pretentious dialogue. At this point Nira interrupts sex (she has the same distracted, distant expression she wears in the workshops; she’s forever listening, to cite Virginia Woolf, to birds chirping in Greek) and wanders away from a soldier’s party to take phone calls from Yoav, the latter in the white heat of inspiration: “There are those who say love is gained by force…Without thought the sea is purple.”
But is it poetry? If Orpheus had a message, it was to show the exquisite line between swank and bullshit, and Jean Cocteau’s film did boast a literal heavenly muse feeding Jean Marais the purplest verse. The Kindergarten Teacher offers nothing more numinous than a tow-headed imp suggesting that he’s pulling off the longest of games with adults who want to be suckered. If Yoav’s aware of the sexual subtext of Nira’s interest, the boy makes clear who’s boss. As the final twenty minutes take a turn at once foreseen and feeble, Lapid’s coolness does little to mitigate these responses (a contrivance involving a bathroom door that locks from the outside makes me question Israel’s much vaunted meticulousness about security). When it happens, I suggest viewers remember a scene a half hour earlier that represents The Kindergarten Teacher‘s truest attempt at poetry: an unexplained and out of context reverie in which a colleague of Nira’s emerges from the sea and faces the camera to sing a song about a quick, orange lion. But then for twenty years I have placed the stress on the word “nothing” in the Auden line cited above. Poetry creates the nothing. The Kindergarten Teacher grasps this in bits.
Humanizing The Vacuum 