Movie Review: Private Lessons

Around 1980, a film (if you can call it that) called Porky's came out, and the success of this teenage raunch film lead to a series of other films following similar themes, mostly of teenage boys lusting after teenage girls. In Porky's, for example, teenage guys manage to sneak peeks into a girls showers, and hilarity ensues.

During the spate of such films, there was Private Lessons, about a rich teenage boy whose chauffeur has some plot to get money from the son while the father (the mother doesn't seem to be around, probably divorced) is out of town. He has a foreign woman (apparently a Dutch actress whose acted in a series of Emmanuelle films) try to seduce the teenage boy. There's something creepily unnerving about this

The plot itself is almost totally ludicrous, and seems to only serve to prop up the main point which appears to be to get the woman naked and have the boy sleep with her. The guy seems a bit like Fred Savage, and so it is awkward to see this happily smiling boy being seduced by an older woman, who, for her part, plays it sympathetically. Because it fit in with other movies of the genre, and because the rest of the film seems so sitcomish, it almost hides the fact that such a film could hardly be made today, given the backdrop of teachers sleeping with their students.

Indeed, were it not for its laughably dumb idea, it's perhaps one of the few movies that attempts to explore older woman, younger man relationships, if you can call it an exploration. Another film that somewhat explores this issue is Beautiful Girls, which, on top of exploring a town where no one much seems to leave, where people relive high school glory (an issue also dealt with in Friday Night Lights), explores the fascination of Timothy Hutton's character with a precocious Nathalie Portman who plays the teenager next door.

In movies like that, and, say, American Beauty, there's some sense that the guy knows that he shouldn't be attracted to teenaged girls half his age. Private Lessons, having the genders reversed, treats it as some adolescent fantasy, and is borderline sitcom about it. About the only realistic aspect is how scared he is to do it initially, which gives the film several more opportunities for he and she to get together.

European films tend to look at this rather seriously, say, The School of Flesh (though the male is a bit older in this film, and has a considerably darker history, than the wide eyed innocent of this film).

Fundamentally, it has the same appeal as Porky's, namely, teenage males that want to see nude women, and yet, wraps this in a plot that would ordinarily be far more subversive than what actually makes it on the screen, and while that hardly redeems the film, it makes it a little less than completely forgettable, and one imagines, under surer hands, it would be quite a bit more offensive or offending than it already is.