Cinema and television have a range of toxic obsessions, but none more so than the illicit teacher-student love affair. The allure may lie in the challenge of portraying the taboo; creating something entertaining and aesthetic on screen that is unequivocally abhorred in reality.
A Teacher is Jason Bateman’s production company, Aggregate Films’, latest attempt at the dynamic. It is a television adaptation of Hannah Fidell’s film of the same name and has been picked up by The BBC. The miniseries follows 30-something teacher Claire (Kate Mara) and her relationship with her eighteen-year-old student Eric (Nick Robinson), in a small Texan town.
The relationship follows a well-rehearsed pattern; Eric needs better grades to receive a scholarship, Claire offers him extra tutoring and they secretly begin to build a fantasy where the lines of student and teacher become blurred by passion. Only, fantasy soon becomes reality when they find themselves in the backseat of her car in an empty parking lot.
