THE TEACHER -- Palestinian Drama Speaks Truth to Power

Review by Daniel Lima

As a black man who believes in the power of art to speak truth to power, I often find myself conflicted in how to approach films that attempt to do so through wholly conventional means. Does the message supersede the message takes? Should a film be lauded for shedding light or providing an underrepresented perspective on an issue, even if the way it does so is aesthetically compromised? The Palestinian drama The Teacher has me asking these questions yet again, and while it is worth commending, it is also clearly a work limited by certain constraints.

Saleh Bakri plays a schoolteacher in the West Bank, long past his firebrand activist youth but whose ideals have never wavered. As the occupying Israeli forces and settler bear down on his neighborhood, he attempts to guide a student to cultivate his anger in productive ways. Doing so proves difficult under the unceasing yoke of oppression and colonization.

Helmed by the Palestinian-British director Farah Nabulsi and shot in the West Bank, there is a refreshing lack of throat clearing in the film’s condemnation of Israel’s treatment of the West Bank and Palestine. These characters live under constant threat of assault, they have little to no recourse through any system that could preserve their rights, and there is an explicit understanding that this inescapable great evil is wrong. That’s not a given these days.

To that end, characters discuss life under occupation and how it affects them in a direct manner, without ever feeling the need to justify or couch their anger and pain. This dialogue could be called heavy-handed, but it carries the ring of truth, like conversations that the people living in such oppressive conditions may regularly have. That Nabulsi takes a more naturalistic approach to these scenes, emphasizing the soundscape of the environment and relying on the powerful and nuanced performances of her actors — Bakri and Muhammad Abed Elrahman in particular — to sell the dialogue goes a long way.

This is most evident in how the film addresses violence against the Israeli state and individual settlers encroaching on Palestinian land. Characters may treat it as a necessity, they may speak of it in anger, and they may be disabused of it, but the film pointedly never gives voice to the idea that this violence is wrong because violence is in general wrong, only that it should never be prosecuted out base anger and should strive to better the conditions of Palestinians. A lesser artist may have struck a more genteel form of discourse, one that flatters the sensibility of goodhearted Western liberals but ignores the experiences of a population whom violence may be visited upon with impunity. To Nabulsi’s great credit, she never feels the need to apologize for or explain why these people feel the way they do.

That this is not present is a testament to the lived-in understanding of the world of these characters, and the challenges faced by oppressed populations the world over. It is, without a doubt, the strongest part of The Teacher, the thing that sets it apart as an important film that speaks to one of the great moral issues of our time. That audacity, however, is not reflected in the storytelling.

Whenever the film wavers in its attention to the struggle of the Palestinian characters, things come to a screeching halt. A storyline about an IDF soldier held hostage by militant Palestinian forces attempts to provide more perspectives on this struggle, and when it does intersect with the leads it does allow for meaningful exchanges between them. Unfortunately, too much of it shifts the focus onto people who are given no time to be fleshed out, and interrupts the sense of place and focus the film would otherwise have.

Worse yet is Imogen Poots, playing a young aid worker who grows close to Bakri. Her performance is serviceable, but every time she shows up it feels like an intrusion. Had the film been interested in addressing the role of well-meaning Westerners in an occupation aided and abetted by their governments, perhaps this wouldn’t feel so superfluous. As it stands, it’s hard to shake the feeling that white British woman is only here to secure funding for the film.

As much as I respect the forthright manner the issue of Palestinian oppression and liberation are addressed in The Teacher, that is not to say that it aesthetically matches the fire of its rhetoric. While Nabulsi tends towards that more naturalistic approach, the score does creep in to underline the emotion of a scene, clashing with the rest of the film. When it does, the blunt dialogue can ring less as authentic, and more as the kind of self-important social issues drama the film otherwise feels like a departure from. This is not helped by the fact that, by necessity, almost the entirety of the experiences of these people is reduced to suffering and reacting to suffering.

Here is where I find myself most conflicted. As of late, I have found myself very disappointed by the black cinema of today. Too often, I find these works only portray the black American experience as unceasing suffering, never argue for revolutionary change, lack any creative ambition, and so fail to meaningfully speak truth to power. To give a recent example, the film Nickel Boys may be aesthetically audacious, but roots its observations about black America firmly in the past, narrowing its scope and impact.

The Teacher, however, is a film that is wholly of its time. The occupation of Palestine and the subjugation of Palestinians is an evil that is if anything not even discussed enough, let alone argued against with such vigor. Though the form is takes is somewhat wanting in terms of narrative cohesion and structure, it is a film that feels important not because it announces itself as such, but because it forcefully speaks for justice and empathy on an issue where so many in power are comfortable with neither. We would be so lucky if more cinema was this engaged with the world.

The Teacher is now in theaters.

Rating: 3.5/5