In Nadav Lapid’s Israeli film The Kindergarten Teacher, winner of the Best Director award at this year’s BAFICI and at the Jerusalem Film Festival, Nira (Sarit Larry) is a married, middle-aged, hard-working and loving kindergarten teacher with a genuine penchant for poetry. Though it seems she’s always enjoyed it, it’s only now that she’s started to try to pen her own poems.
One day she learns that a young boy in her Kindergarten class, five-year-old Yoav (Avi Shnaidman), has an uncanny ability to create and recite his own poetry, which he spouts in sudden bursts, as if he was in a trance. Nira finds Yoav’s poetry to be moving and inspiring — it’s filled with mature, meditative words you wouldn’t expect from a young child. So it won’t take long until Nira starts spending a great deal of time with Yoav, both trying to stimulate his ability and writing down his poems.
But it’s more complex than that. Nira also shields the young poet from his classmates because she fears they could damage his sensibility with their banality. Moreover, she reads his work in her creative writing class as though it was her own. And when she finds out that the boy’s nanny (also a wannabe actress) dismisses the boy’s genius, but also uses his poems as her own for her auditions, then she feels it’s her duty to have her fired. To top it all off, the child’s parents had a recent ugly divorce, and his father, who has custody of him, feels his son’s poetry is pure nonsense, if not just crap. So Nira decides it’s time to intervene in the kid’s life since, in her mind, his needs and wants are not being fulfilled. She believes his poetry won’t flourish if he remains in his current environment.
Like Lapid’s previous film Policeman (2011), winner of Best Film and Best Director award at the BAFICI in 2012, his new opus The Kindergarten Teacher hinges heavily on allegory, despite the fact that it works perfectly in its literality too, something that is very hard to pull off.
You could say that, on the very surface, this is the story of a teacher who cares too much for her student’s genius and is obsessed by it, and so she will go out of her way to the point of obsession to establish a rather unusual bond with him. Even if not explicitly, there’s the suggestion that Nira finds some passionate sentiments when being in touch with the boy’s sensibility. Perhaps even with the boy himself as well, as if he were a perfect object of desire that embodies the beauty of poetry Nira can’t find in the world she inhabits (her husband makes it clear that he couldn’t care less about her newfound calling). In a sense, to Nira there’s sensuality in this type of beauty, there’s sensuality in the body of a poet.
The liaison between this peculiar kindergarten teacher and this equally peculiar child-poet will take a different shape as the drama unfolds. But it’s best for viewers to discover it for themselves: suffice it to say that it’s the teacher who shapes the relationship to her own needs, both imaginary and real, rather than the kid’s needs.
On an allegorical level, you can take the kid’s poetry and the beauty that emanates from it — both at odds with the ordinarily prosaic world that surrounds him — as some kind of threat to his environment as well as to others.
After all, he’s a poet in times where poets are hated, a sensitive soul in a country plagued by the violence of war and the desensitization that comes along with it. In times of peace, poetry tends to be stimulated and celebrated, but in times of war it often bears no value and it’s dismissed. And poets are isolated.
You can also think of the world where the child-poet lives in as a universe overridden with routine, malaise, and indifference. Religion has stopped making sense long ago, spiritual life seems to have vanished for good, and profound emotional connections are not to be found.
So what would happen if, amidst so much emptiness, an intimate connection with life and beauty suddenly emerged? What effect would it have on this world? Would it be possible for it to thrive? Fortunately, no definite answers are to be found in The Kindergarten Teacher as Lapid knows better than that and asks viewers to reflect upon such a complex scenario and then draw their own conclusions.
Production notes
The Kindergarten Teacher (Israel, 2014). Written and directed by Nadav Lapid. With Sarit Larry, Avi Shnaidman, Lior Raz, Hamuchtar, Ester Rada, Guy Oren. Cinematography: Shai Goldman. Editing: Era Lapid. Running time: 119 minutes.
