Teacher / Student Romance: Love Stories & Movies

The Reader

A movie in which both sides of the relationship play both teacher and student 

Michael Berg, a middle aged German barrister, is emembering his lifelong acquaintance with Hanna Schmitz, a relationship he always kept secret. Michael met Hannah in 1958 when he was fifteen and she thirty-six. The two had a love affair in which Hanna took charge and in which their meetings would begin with him reading to her and the two then making love. After years apart, the two finally meet again under much different circumstances in which Michael is in possession of information that could save Hannah from being sentence to time in prison.

The Lover

The Lover asks the question of whether the power of love can overcome social rules and class restrictions. 

The Lover is set in French Colonial Vietnam in 1929 and tells the story of a French girl from a poor family who meets and begins a relationship with a wealthy Chinese businessman. The Lover asks whether the power of love can overcome the limitations put on the couple by society and in this way mirrors the reality of teacher / student relationships.

Harold And Maude

 Harold and Maude shows how a teacher / student relationship can change the student’s life through enlightenment.

Harold is a well-off and needy teenager who is completely obsessed with death and destruction, loving nothing more than funerals and demolitions and simulating suicide several times in a vain attempt to gain attention from parents who show no interest in him. One day he meets Maude, a seventy-nine-year-old anarchist at a funeral home. They become friends and Maude teaches Harold about the cycle of life. With Maude’s love (and her eventual death at the end of the film) Harold’s life in changed forever.

P.S

P.S  shows the teacher / student relationship as being a second chance at a lost love. 

Intelligent and successful Louise Harrigton is the divorced thirty-something year old admissions officer atColumbiaUniversity’sSchoolofFine Arts. One day she interviews F.Scott Feinstadt, a young man who looks exactly like her one true love, who she lost  in a fatal car accident twenty years earlier. Within hours of the interview the two are in an affair, but is Louise only interested in Scott because he reminds her of her lost love, and is Scott only interested in getting into the art’s school?

Notes on a Scandal

Notes on a Scandal shows how the teacher in a teacher / student relationship can enter a perilous situation when the relationship is discovered

Notes on a Scandal tells the story of Barbara Covett, a tough and conservative teacher who is hated by her colleagues and students. Barbara befriends the school’s new art teacher after helping her out and manages to discover that she is having an affair with a fifteen year old student. Barbara uses this information to attack the new teacher, taking advantage of her for  her own selfish sake.

Trailer

Profile of the Student / Teacher Relationship