A REVIEW OF THE FILM
ÉLÈVE LIBRE (2008)
The Belgian film Élève libre (Private Lessons) directed by Joachim Lafosse was released in 2008 and runs 105 minutes.
Pederasty sans emotion
by Diogenes
31 July 2024
The plot of this movie is easy enough to describe. Jonas, a good-looking teen whose poor academic performance, due in large part to his concentration on his training as a tennis player, threatens to have him transferred to a vocational school, is taken under the wing of a 30-year-old tutor, Pierre. Gradually, Pierre and his sexually sophisticated friends, Nathalie and Didier, encourage Jonas to be more sexually experimental, leading to a breach between Jonas and his girlfriend. Pierre then develops a sexual relationship with Jonas in which the latter is introduced to fellatio and pedication. After a time, Jonas reacts to his tutor's teaching in erotics, and accuses Pierre of 'abuse', an accusation which Pierre counters by saying (truly) that he never forced Jonas into anything.
The suggestion is that a relationship can be perverse or abusive even if it involves no coercion. Because Jonas is young and naïve, and doesn't really know what he wants, he is not (so the director would have us believe) a genuinely free agent, and is unable to set limits to his interactions with Pierre that would have spared him an unsatisfactory relationship as well as the loss of his girlfriend. What the movie elides is the question of how we are to make judgements about what we want without some acquaintance with what we are making judgements about; and this must necessarily involve a degree of experimentation and risk. The possibility of having unsatisfactory and failed relationships is the price we pay for being free to cultivate those relationships that give our lives meaning. How indeed can Jonas come to know what he wants unless he is free to make his own decisions, and his own mistakes?
It seems to me that what is unsatisfactory about the relationship between Jonas and Pierre is not, as the director seems to suggest, the fact that one of the parties is more sexually innocent than the other, but simply the fact that it is a surprisingly cold relationship. Certainly, from the very start, all three main adults in this movie are portrayed as having an obsessive interest in Jonas' sex life; and Pierre's pederastic relationship with Jonas is portrayed as being focused entirely on sex with seemingly no emotional dimension to it at all. It is therefore a relationship devoid of real tenderness, and it is unsurprising that Jonas rebels against it.
One cannot help but wonder what the film would have been like if Jonas had been seduced by a man who was more obviously loving and tender towards him, and seemingly less fixated on a purely physical relationship that ignored the emotional side of pederasty; indeed, if the man had been a genuine boy-lover and therefore a better exemplar of the ideals of Greek pedagogic pederasty. If Pierre seems less than ideal as a lover, and Jonas' rebellion against his 'tuition' seems understandable, this is only because the director chose not to portray a different kind of situation, but instead opted for a relationship that would enable him to indulge in moralising. And whereas the flawed and unemotional relationship the director portrays is no doubt not unknown, a far more interesting film might have resulted had the director gone for the truly dangerous option, one that would have challenged his viewers' preconceptions about pederasty rather than confirmed them. This, however, would have required a degree of courage that most directors today would find impossible.
