Araz Eleyasian | The Paper Rose / 2018

tutoring the teacher

by Douglas Messerli

 

Talin Agon and Araz Eleyasian (screenplay), Araz Eleyasian (director) The Paper Rose / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

A very frustrated English teacher, Toni (Bronte Pearce) is nervous about her day in school. She’s teaching Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, a book she clearly loves. But when we see the antics of her students, each spending the classroom time sending text messages to the others when they’re not taunting the quiet Johnny (Damian Hempstead), we comprehend her trepidation. Her lesbian lover, Maggie, has given her a red paper rose, which remains as a book marker in her book to help remind her that she’s loved at home.

    When a bullying student throws Johnny’s book the floor as he leaves the classroom, the teacher finally has had enough, taking away the student’s cellphone and telling him he can pick it up at the end of the day. But he even challenges her, coming at her and pulling her copy of Great Expectations from her arms and tossing the paper rose to the floor, and stopping on the paper flower as he storms out of the room.

      As Johnny bends down to pick up the objects, the occasion of the rose, moments of joy, and more importantly, moments of extreme tension between the couple quickly reel through the teacher’s mind. The rose has clearly come to represent a great many events in her life. As Johnny hands back the book and rose, he suggests that he might be able to make another one, but Toni observes that it was a gift, and irreplaceable for that very reason.

      Still, he argues that she might be able to make another one that can’t be destroyed unless she takes into rooms where angry 14-year-old boys can stomp on them.

      A short while later, Toni passes by the same boy with another like him, asking “where’s the fruit,” presumably referring to Johnny, the other replying, “Probably at home in bed crying.” The teacher stops for a moment to glare at them before moving on.

 

      She pulls opens a locker door—presumably inspecting it as she may have forced to in the past—to witness a calendar marked up with the word “fag,” a glob of what looks like cum, and a picture of a naked man marked up with the words, “Lick if off Johnny.” In a split second she recalls her own youth when someone threw a soccer ball at her head, screaming out “Hey dyke.”

 

      As she leaves the building, she discovers Johnny sitting reading the Dickens book, she responding, “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

      “They screwed up my locker again, didn’t they?” he half laughs. “I don’t care if they think I’m gay.”

     She assures him that they won’t get away with it. But he is more interested in the book she has assigned, telling her how “awesome” he finds the novel. She’s clearly pleased that at least one student is enjoying the book. But she quickly returns to what she perceives as his dilemma. “You have it tough, don’t you?”

      But his response is again amazingly aloof: “Shit happens. I like to come here with Pip and….”

      She finishes his sentence, “…disappear.”

      “No, just read.”

     Toni argues that she always identified more with Stella, Johnny arguing “But she’s so damaged. You’re not like that.”

       She confides, in a round-about way, that the reason she stays late at school is because she doesn’t want to go home. “Teaching is one of the only things I’m good at.”

       “Don’t get lost in stories, Johnny,” she advises her new confidant.

       Johnny’s answer is surprisingly mature. “But I’m not lost. I know who I am.”

      What we observe here for one of the first occasions in queer cinema is a young man, perhaps gay and certainly bullied, revealing a greater sense of self possession, knowledge, and maturity than both the kids around him and the troubled adult teacher. He even dares to go further, asking Toni if she knows who she is. A strange half-smile registers on her face as she hands him back his book and wishes him happy Valentine’s Day.

       In it, is a white paper rose. Johnny smiles with joy.

       We see Toni knocking at her lover’s door, having apparently previously left or broken up with her. The two greet one another with reluctant smiles, which we know will certainly shift to fuller expressions of love given that behind Toni’s back she holds a whole bouquet of paper roses.

     Australian director Araz Eleyasian has provided us with a film that quickly pulls its LGBTQ characters out of their usual hurt and passive positions, giving them a self-awareness that makes it clear they are not simply survivors but are whole beings who will prevail.

      I have to admit that basically through the days I my teaching experiences I was blessed with multiple good students, and these, being college kids, did not behave like high school thugs. But there was always one special student to change your day. 

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).