CLASS IN SESSION AND IT’S A FAMILIAR LESSON
Hackneyed premise revitalized by compelling setting, strong acting
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A brilliant but wounded teacher signs up to instruct some scrappy, underprivileged kids, changes their lives and, in the process, learns a few important truths about himself.
You have? What if the instrument of choice was the violin, and the movie based on an inspirational true story?
Oh yeah; Meryl Streep in Music of the Heart. Well, regardless, get ready to see it again. And if The Violin Teacher hits many of the same notes, it also manages a few new ones, thanks to the setting of Heliopolis (also the film’s original Portuguese title), one of the largest and most dangerous slums of São Paulo.
Laerte (soulful Brazilian actor Lázaro Ramos), a former child prodigy, is trying to get into the city’s prestigious orchestra. But an attack of nerves silences his bow on audition day.
Needing to make ends meet, he signs up to teach at an innercity school, where most of the kids wouldn’t know an arpeggio from an appoggiatura. (Full disclosure: I just looked up those terms.)
But there are two promising kids in the class, Samuel (Kaique de Jesus), and VR (Elzio Vieira). Alas, they’re not merely stringsmart — they’re also running a credit-card cloning operation that has them in debt to some of the neighbourhood’s shadier characters.
Laerte finds himself gradually drawn into the kids’ lives — as one of the local thugs corners him and demands a class recital in honour of his daughter’s quinceañera birthday party.
The uncultured gangster wants “the gas company waltz,” which I guess played on an advertisement, and turns out to be Strauss’s Blue Danube. (Fuller disclosure: For many years I thought of it as “the Space Odyssey Waltz.”)
There are the usual revelations and crises: the kid whose parents don’t understand his musical dedication; the moment where someone calls the teacher a selfish, privileged so-and-so; and the appearance of a way out of this job for Laerte, causing him to weigh professional self-interest against teacherly altruism.
But there’s also some very real violence in Heliopolis, and the sense that for most if not all of these kids, even musical talent may not provide a way out of poverty; it may have to suffice as its own reward.
This is enough to elevate the material beyond just-anotherteacher-movie status, if not by an octave, at least a semitone.