Alexandru Ionașcu
In recent years, various reports of intimate relationships between female teachers and their students have appeared in the foreign press. These relationships were each time censured and punished. However, each time the public was shocked to learn that a female teacher could have a relationship with one of her students, especially since it is usually men who take advantage of their authority in the teaching environment to start relationships with female students. A Higher Law (2021), Octav Chelaru’s debut feature film, shows the public perception that a woman who gets involved in an affair with a student deserves to be shamed in front of her family and professionally, and that disciplinary action alone is not enough. But as unacceptable as these relationships may be, the film I will examine here seeks to show us that if we place the relationship between a teacher and her student in the context of a society dominated by the hypocrisy of mainstream orthodoxy, then miraculously such a relationship becomes something ambiguous and morally grey rather than very inappropriate.
To what extent does social context influence our decisions and where is the line between professional and family life? How do we know where consent ends and abuse begins in our personal relationships? These questions are even more important given that Romanian society does not accept discussions about sexuality and always tends to blame women and stigmatize their sexuality. Octav Chelaru’s film doesn’t try to answer these questions (in case you were expecting that), but to immerse us in these problems that women and Romanian pre-university education face. However, it also gives us something extra, something disturbing in this regard.
For those who want to understand what is going on in this film (what is also called a plot thread), the narrative unfolds as follows. At a high school, considered at the beginning of the film to be the best in town and at the end of the film to be the second best, Ekaterina Ivanovici is somewhat of a maverick religion teacher. That is to say, she prefers to ask her students difficult questions in order to conduct her religion classes by not following the curriculum to the letter. She asks questions that are morally difficult. As the film progresses and the teacher’s situation becomes more complicated, we see that their answers are not convincing. What does this mean?
Sexually dissatisfied with her priest husband, for whom sex is a mechanical thing done before bedtime, an intolerant mother-in-law who blames her for what she did at some point in high school and for which no one deserves to be blamed, Ekaterina succumbs to the magnetism in the eyes of the student, Iuliu, and the two have a sexual experience in her car on a hill outside of town. This relationship unfolds against the backdrop of a tightening Romanian society largely dominated by the Orthodox Church and its representatives. Thus we understand the suffocating situation in which the teacher, whose husband is a priest, finds herself.
By this point in the story, Octav Chelaru is trying to show us the suffocating traditionalist context from which our heroine is seeking escape. But things begin to take a dubious turn. The movie moves towards an attempt to punish the woman who has succumbed to her desires and had sexual intercourse with a student.
In her interactions with her high school students, one would think that one of them, the student Iuliu, is not only outside the box, but also loves freedom when he tells the teacher that one is free to choose. So far, nothing wrong. Iuliu is a student who believes in the freedom of choice, right? Not exactly.
Iuliu immediately adds that one can only choose if there are no rules, if there is no meaning. Considering his further development, the character played by Sergiu Smerea is a sociopath. Refusing to accept he cannot have a relationship with his teacher, he becomes a sort of Mr. Hyde, determined to punish his partner with whom he had a tryst. To this end, he invades her home and switches her husband’s (Alexandru Papadopol’s) pills, assaults a friend of the teacher and eventually forces the teacher to admit the extramarital affair to her husband. One might get the impression that Iuliu is trying to protect his relationship with the teacher, say, when he drugs her son so that he can find out from him what he knows about his mother’s extramarital affair.
Inspired by an actual case, Octav Chelaru’s film is about everyday religious fundamentalism that is not perceived as such, about the fundamentalist way of living one’s faith. Alexandru Papadopol plays a character whose religious dogmatism means an inability to see the world as wider than the small town he lives in and the church he attends. How could anyone be saved apart from those Christians who belong to the denomination called the Christian Orthodox Church?
Such provincialism cannot conceive that a woman can live out her sexuality outside of marriage, which is why Alexander Papadopol’s character is completely ignorant of his wife’s desires. On the other hand, Sergiu Smerea always fixes his gaze on someone, especially the religion teacher, so the viewer will know from the start that this character will have an important influence in the film, and not a positive one. For the student Iuliu, the basic rules of everyday life by which we function and which tell us to respect the freedom of others, to care for their physical and mental well-being, do not really exist; they are at best a means by which people control others (his warped view).
Therefore, this character believes that freedom is when you follow your selfish desires at the expense of others. This thinking is no different from the reasoning of those Romanian commentators who are always saying on private tv how there should be no social services because the free market is always self-regulating and leads to progress. These so-called commentators also go by the name of libertarians.
In other words, because the teacher doesn’t want to build a relationship with him, Iuliu thinks he has the right to take revenge on her and destroy her life.
I appreciated how Octav Chelaru’s film reviews some well-known but little-discussed problems facing Romanian education, such as the lack of psychologists to tackle the emotional difficulties students face, especially when their parents are working in other countries. Or the school management’s belief in keeping up appearances, not admitting mistakes but blaming the parents.
The protagonist is played by actress Malina Manovici, who plays religion teacher Ekaterina Ivanovici, a woman torn between her duties as a priest’s wife and her desire for freedom with someone else. It’s a desire that manifests itself in small, everyday things, like smoking hidden cigarettes, jogging in the evening and raising moral and theological issues with her students. But the moment she abandons conformity and gives in to her erotic urges is followed by a series of traumatic events that show us the understanding that a woman who enters into a relationship with a student deserves to be shamed. Thus the student with whom she embarks on a sexual escapade turns out to be a sociopath who tries to shame her in front of her husband, add the son’s contempt for her and the final scene seems to tell us that women who behave badly will be punished differently from men. If he who has an affair with a schoolgirl is a man, he only receives disciplinary punishment, but when a woman has an affair with a male student she should prepare herself to be exposed for ridicule and abandoned, just as in the final scene of the film when the protagonist is abandoned the moment her son and husband close and leave her alone in her room.
In conclusion, I would say that I am disappointed with the way Octav Chelaru has depicted the female character in the situation of a priest’s wife, i.e. as a victim of circumstances who, when she reacts, is punished. In Bacalaureat (2016), Malina Manovici also plays a teacher, but she is more determined and shows her independence by wanting to clarify the situation of the extramarital relationship she is in. Despite my objections, Octav Chelaru’s feature film debut should be appreciated for the courage with which he tackles a subject that is quite taboo for Romanian society. Let us also note the atmosphere of the thriller as a backdrop for an analysis of the contradictions faced by a woman caught up in a religious social context. Without moralizing or criticizing the Orthodox Church, A Higher Law tells us that there is something harder to bear than monogamous marriage. There is also monogamous marriage to an Orthodox priest.
Balaur (A Higher Law) (2021), directed by Octav Chelaru, starring Malina Manovici, Sergiu Smerea, Alexandru Papadopol
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