My Tutor (5 Stars)

This is the seventh film in my high school marathon. In my opinion, it's the best coming-of-age film ever made. No other film comes close. That makes me all the sadder to see that it's now out of print. I'm happy that I bought it when it was still available on Blu-ray in 2017.

I first saw it in the cinema in 1983. It's one of those films that was so special that I remember where I was when I watched it. I was working in Homburg, near Saarbrücken. Because of the machine usage, I had to start late every day, after 2 pm. I wandered through the town in the morning, looking for a film to watch before work. I found a small cinema with two screens. One film was "My Tutor", the other was a film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. There were two of us in the cinema, me and a slightly older man. I wanted to watch "My Tutor" and he wanted to watch Belmondo. The woman who owned the cinema said that she never showed films for one person, so we had to decide what we would watch together. Luckily the man was happy with "My Tutor", because there was no way I'd sit through a Belmondo film.

The film begins with 17-year-old Bobby Chrystal doing the last exam of his finals, French. It's a subject he's very bad at. We see that the girls are better than the boys. One by one the girls finish the exam and walk out, leaving the boys on their seats. Then the boys leave, until finally only Bobby is left. When the time is up, Bobby is sitting alone.

A recurring theme throughout the film is female superiority. When the girls walk past him, Bobby remembers watching them in an aerobics class doing sexual gyrations. He sees them laughing as they thrust their hips, and he imagines they're laughing at him. As he sits at his desk, unable to answer the questions, his feelings of inferiority arouse him.

A roomful of girls with their hips raised enticingly is torture for Bobby as a virgin. Any boy who's seen something like this can never forget it, and he can't get it out of his mind while he's failing the exam.

Bobby's father is a rich lawyer, and he's determined that Bobby should get into Yale to study law. He arranges that Bobby will be accepted if he retakes the French exam before the end of the holidays are scores at least 85%. He hires a French tutor called Terry Green to live in their house and give him lessons every day. Apart from her usual salary, she'll receive a bonus of $10,000 if Bobby passes. That was a lot of money in 1983, more than most people earned in a year.

It's a hot summer in Los Angeles, so most of the lessons are held by the pool. How can Bobby possibly concentrate when she's wearing a bikini like that?

A subplot running through the film is that Bobby and his best friend Jack are trying to lose their virginity, aided by Jack's older brother Billy. It doesn't work. When they're taken to meet two women, Bobby passes out because he drinks too much, while Jack's date is a dominatrix who scares him away. On another occasion they try to chat up mud wrestlers. Not a good idea.

She would have scared me as well, but I wouldn't run away. I'd take my punishment like a man.

Bobby isn't just learning French, he's reading about sex. Are there really 101 different positions?

But as I said at the beginning, this is a coming-of-age film. Bobby falls in love with his teacher, and the affection is mutual, even though she's 29. The question is whether it's the beginning of a permanent relationship or just a summer fling. I've given away spoilers for almost all the film, so I'll keep that as one last secret.

"My Tutor" is funny and sexy, and it's a feelgood movie. There's no way in which I can fault it.