Joachim Lafosse, one of Belgium’s most prolific emerging directors, is in the Cannes sidebar section Directors' Fortnight for the first time, with his fourth feature Private Lessons [trailer, film focus]. Dedicated, like his previous title Private Property [trailer], to “our own limits”, the film is a new chapter in the director’s personal exploration of complex characters, usually placed in small contexts that he seems to love to describe beyond appearances.
Biological family, the setting for the conflict in Private Property, is here replaced by a surrogate family, a surrogate father in particular. Teenager Jonas (Jonas Bloquet) has failed his exams once again and is about to be sent to a technical school, where, according to him, all the “losers” are. He tends to hang around with older people and ends up finding a new tutor in family friend Pierre (Jonathan Zaccaï). Lafosse’s intention is to question the limits of that unexpected and increasingly ambiguous “tutorial”: what is the line between “transmission” and “transgression”?

Full of meal scenes – “there is nothing more sexual than eating”, says Lafosse – the script, which he co-wrote with François Pirot, slowly evolves from a portrait of a lost teenager to a brave and disturbing tale of manipulation. Brave because the dialogues are unafraid to provoke a nervous laugh and even repulsion in viewers. Disturbing because towards the end it becomes increasingly more difficult to clearly distinguish between the “abuser” and the “victim”.

Therefore, it may be no coincidence that beyond his apparently flat performance, Jonas’ beauty seems to recall Tadzio from Death in Venice and it might also be that Pierre is nothing more than a “a victim of himself”, adds the director, suffering from “his inability to express his desire”.

Private Lessons is the second collaboration between Lafosse and Olivier Brounckart’s Versus Production, also behind Eldorado [trailer] (see news), the other Belgian title in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight.

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