The Teacher

Using a middle-school teacher's Stalin-like authoritarianism as a microcosmic example of the larger abuses of power that eventually led to the demise of Eastern Bloc Communism, director Jan Hrebejk sets this dramedy in mid-1980s Bratislava, the often-ignored Slovak corner of the Iron Curtain. The titular teacher, known as Comrade Drazdechova (Zuzana Mauréry), is a manipulative control freak both in and out of the classroom and, not surprisingly, also heads the local chapter of the Communist Party. Drazdechova gleans information from her pupils about their parents' work, which she uses for her own benefit, manipulating the parents into doing everything from common household errands to free hairstyling. As long as they cooperate, their children are rewarded with preferential treatment. But when the airport-worker father of one student refuses to help her smuggle a cake through the mail to Russia (this was highly illegal), she bites back by singling out his gymnast daughter for in-class humiliation. And this treatment becomes the norm for students with non-compliant parents, with the teacher playing on her students' insecurities to the extent that one attempts suicide. Hrebejk's narrative has a clever chronological structure, flashing backwards and forwards, with the dual narrative strands gracefully dovetailing at the end. Recommended. (M. Sandlin)