`Art For Teachers Of Children' Is `Lolita' From Another Viewpoint

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XXX "Art For Teachers of Children," with Caitlin Grace McDonnell, Duncan Hannah, Tom Carey, Coles Burroughs, Ruth Montgomery. Written and directed by Jennifer Montgomery. Grand Illusion. No rating; includes nudity, sexually frank material. ------------------------------------------------------------------

If "Lolita" had been told from the title character's point of view, it might have resembled this uniquely personal, autobiographical film about a 14-year-old girl's 1970s affair with her married counselor.

John, the older man, is something of a cipher: a coldly manipulative New England prep-school employee who advises Jennifer, starts taking nude photos of her and tells her that sleeping with models is "an essential part of the process."

Carefully played with minimal emotion by painter and underground movie actor Duncan Hannah, John comes perilously close to the kind of cartoon lech who asks innocent girls up to his room to look at his etchings.

Intensely worried that discovery of their affair could lead to scandal, prison and homosexual rape behind bars, he insists that the relationship be clandestine. But it doesn't take long for others to suspect his intentions and try to keep them apart.

"There's nothing more dangerous than boring men who make bad art," Jennifer's mother tells her.

By film's end, John seems more interested in photography than his sexless marriage, his sexual liaisons with other students or his relationship with Jennifer, who forthrightly asks him to acknowledge her by deflowering her.

"We needed to know that we existed," she says. For all his sleaziness, John provides that affirmation. He thinks she shows promise as a writer and tells her she's writing "way beyond your years." Desperately fishing for compliments, she asks if that means he likes her work.

Jennifer, played with enigmatic plainness by Caitlin Grace McDonnell, is simply unformed, impatient with her status as a virgin, given to such thoughts as "a strange purposelessness filled the air," which turn up on the soundtrack at incongruous moments. The contrast, which recalls Sissy Spacek's blandly romantic narration of a killing spree in "Badlands," lends a deadpan-comic spin to this tale of exploiter and victim.

Photographed in rough, documentary-like black-and-white, the movie could easily have been an act of revenge, but it's remarkably objective and reflective about the past. Even though its 34-year-old writer-director uses her own name and comes close to naming the real John (photographer Jock Sturges), "Art For Teachers of Children" is no more vindictive than "Lolita."

It ends with Montgomery's real-life harassment by the FBI, which failed to recruit her to testify against Sturges in a child-pornography inquiry in 1989.

"As one of the photographic subjects in question," she claims, "I have my own perverse angle on the case and the surrounding storm of controversy."

For all its raw, unpolished touches, the film that refines that "director's statement" is a provocative, unsettling examination of the idea of sexual innocence.