lasttimeisaw
Out of blue, I get a chance to watch this Thai gay-themed film, TEACHER AND STUDENT by director Sarawut Intaraprom, a mini-budget drama plumps for exclusivity about three main characters, a young high-school teacher, his boyfriend and one of his student.Before the opening credits, we are introduced into a rural landscape where the teacher and his boyfriend, who wears student uniform, gleefully rollicking around, then fast-forward from 2005 to 2010, briefly presented by TV montages of Thailand's political transformation (which will continue throughout the slow-paced narrative) and the photos manifesting their growth trajectory, until a marriage license cements their relationship. Now the boyfriend has graduated and the teacher starts to teach English in a high school.Here arrives the five-year itch, the teacher involuntarily becomes attracted to one of his student - a fairly ordinary-looking one, if compared with his more handsome and well-proportioned boyfriend, especially aroused by his school uniform. The heart wants what the heart wants, his fetish accelerates from sexual fantasy to seeking pleasure from the stolen uniform which emanates the body scent of the student.Shot with a deliberately artsy pace, the film brazenly prefers form than content, the latter is a common-or-garden dramatisation of relationship disintegration, the boyfriend will find out the teacher's fetish, and they try out an exigent way to solve the issue, to no avail, then a breakup and eventually the teacher advances a desperate move to express his feelings to the student when his fetish is spotted by him in broad daylight.To mystify the paper-thin plot, Intaraprom adds a metaphysical figure, a man in the mask, who pops up regularly to bring about a tingle of ominousness, as a metaphor of the teacher's unbridled fixation. Trying heavy-handedly to mingle gay romance, thriller and political drama with a taboo topic, TEACHER AND STUDENT doesn't situate itself impressively in none of the genres, frankly speaking, it is more like a student's graduation work than a veteran director's latest offering.
