THE VIOLIN TEACHER (Sérgio Machado). 102 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (October 28). See Listings. Rating: NNN
The Violin Teacher plays like a Brazilian update of the 90s Michelle Pfeiffer chestnut Dangerous Minds. Here Laerte (Lázaro Ramos), a struggling violinist, takes a teaching gig at a high school in the slums of Heliópolis after a disastrous audition for a São Paolo orchestra derails his career.
Winning over the apathetic students isn’t enough. Laerte finds himself confronting his own limitations as a musician and even negotiating with a crime boss when one of his students makes a few bad decisions.
We know how this sort of movie goes, and so does director Sérgio Machado, who’s content to hit the required beats for most of the first hour while Ramos does his best to make us care about Laerte’s conflicts and frustrations.
For most of that hour, The Violin Teacher seems as obvious as its title, but then Machado reminds us we’re in present-day Brazil, not a Disney movie. And the location makes all the difference when tensions between the militarized police and the citizens of Heliópolis finally explode, shoving the prefabricated narrative aside for a sequence of real immediacy and pain.
