Art for Teachers of Children Movie Review

I've listened to DOZENS of after-the-fact stories from teenage girls seduced by adult males and from adult males who seduced teenage girls. The girls always seem to affect a cynical tone about experiences that clearly turned their lives upside down. The men are more flip; it was no big deal, she wanted it, she was screwed up anyway, yackety-yack. So Jennifer Montgomery's Art for Teachers of Children, documenting a sexual relationship between a 14-year-old student and her 28-year-old married school counselor, is a major button pusher from frame one. Montgomery's black-and-white feature film debut is atrociously acted (with a 22-year-old woman and 40-year-old guy in the leading roles) and stubbornly resists expressing ANY point of view. “There's nothing worse than boring men who make bad art,” Montgomery's real-life mother (and no actress) intones on the soundtrack. See, Montgomery, then 33, wanted to make her fact-based movie about art, but why choose this particular topic if she didn't want to make some sort of comment about men who lust after children and the children who love them? It's haunting, though, in the same way those flat narratives about being a sexual plaything tug at your heart when they're recited by women who are old at 18.

1995 82m/B Caitlin Grace McDonnell, Duncan Hannah, Coles Burroughs, Bryan Keane; D:Jennifer Montgomery; W: Jennifer Montgomery; C: Jennifer Montgomery. VHS