#325: Private Lessons
Release Date: August 28th, 1981
Format: Streaming (Tubi)
Written by: Dan Greenburg
Directed by: Alan Myerson
2.5 Stars
My first attempt at watching Private Lessons came on a late weekday afternoon. I was lying on the couch and thought it would be the exact type of ‘80s cheeze that would lull me into a nice nap.
It didn’t work. It’s a strange movie, the type that you rewind every few minutes to make sure you’re not missing something. It couldn’t be this unnerving, could it?
The movie’s opening credits play over an evocative prologue of sorts, with a shot of a woman’s bare legs sticking out of a black car that is parked in front of an inky black backdrop. It looks like something that would be on the cover of a sinister romance novel. The camera slowly pushes in on those prone legs, while from the car we can hear the woman telling her lover where she does and does not want his hands placed on her body. The film then smash cuts to a backyard house party full of teenagers, including our protagonist, a 15-year-old boy named Philly (Eric Brown), and his husky best friend, Sherman (Patrick Piccininni). The two boys aren’t there to drink beer or socialize, but rather to leer at the older high school girls and look into bedroom windows to see if they can glimpse some sex or nudity. After they’re caught acting like little creeps by a teacher chaperone (Meridith Baer; what type of house party has a chaperone?), the movie then jumps to an airport, where Philly is saying goodbye to his dad (Ron Foster) who is flying away for a business trip. On Philly’s way home from the airport we learn that his father owns a limo and has a personal chauffeur named Lester (Howard Hesseman), bewigged and wearing a bad fake mustache (it’s unclear at this point if the bad wig and mustache is just poor costuming or part of the character). As the limo pulls up to a mansion, Earth, Wind, and Fire’s song, “Fantasy,” begins to play on the film’s soundtrack and we get a montage of Philly strolling through his palatial home, admiring all of its accoutrement. He ends up taking an elevator to his upstairs bedroom. As he lies down on top of his bed, the horns and rhythm section of Earth, Wind, and Fire are in full force, making for a bizarre juxtaposition.
What the fuck is this movie?
It’s at this point that I turned off Private Lessons. I’m just trying to take an afternoon nap, and this movie is making me feel drugged.
My second viewing attempt came under even worse conditions: around midnight after a few drinks. I had no chance. All I was able to do is confirm that the first fifteen minutes were as bizarre as I remembered.
But this morning came my third and (mostly) successful attempt at critically watching Private Lessons. As far as the plot goes: Lester the chauffeur turns out to be evil and blackmails a French maid, Nicole Mallow (Sylvia Kristel, of Emmanuelle fame), with deportation if she doesn’t agree to have sex with Philly, then pretend to die of a heart attack during their tryst, and then quit her job and leave town. Lester believes that the boy will be so distraught and ashamed of his involvement with Nicole’s death and their sexual relationship, that he’ll happily pay Lester $10,000 from the family safe in exchange for helping him get rid of her body. In the end the chauffeur’s plan falls apart when Philly and Nicole team up to take Lester down and get the $10,000 back.
It’s a contrived plot, and writer Dan Greenburg just dumps most of it on the movie’s second half.
What makes Private Lessons most remarkable, though, is its confused, and possibly sinister, moral compass. This is a film that condones what is technically statutory rape, and it does this by adopting the perspective of Philly, our horny 15-year-old protagonist. When his physical intimacy with the older Nicole advances further and further, the boy can’t wait to tell his best friend Sherman about all the juicy details: peeking at Nicole through a window turns into her inviting him to watch her undress; later, they’ll kiss and hold hands; they’ll share a bubblebath; they’ll finally have sex.
Today this would be labeled grooming, the predatory act of manipulating a person into a sexual relationship, but the attitude of Private Lessons seems to be, “Yeah, but the boy does want to have sex, so is he really a victim?”
The answer to that is, well, yes, he is. Nicole is in her late 20s, and he is 15. He is a victim because he cannot legally give his consent.
What further erodes Private Lessons’ moral foundation is the circumstances surrounding its production. Eric Brown really was 15-years-old during filming (he looks even younger) and Sylvia Kristel really was 28-years-old. In the movie you’ll see her undress in front of him, with full frontal nudity. You’ll see him touch her body, including her breasts. You’ll see them in provocative scenarios that include simulated sex.
Why cast Eric Brown? That is a critical question here. The filmmakers could have easily found a younger looking 18-year-old actor to play underage, but it’s as if the script’s horny misplaced logic pervaded the casting decisions.
Did Eric Brown enjoy touching and kissing Sylvia Kristel on camera? That question is missing the point, but the casting decision assumes that yes, of course he enjoyed it. He’s a teenage boy!
That naive assumption looms over the film’s tone and possibly affected the young actor’s psyche. In his own words, here’s what an adult Eric Brown had to say about his involvement in Private Lessons: “It was inappropriate. I mean, it was inappropriate. You should not do that. They should cast an 18 year old…I don't think it did any lasting damage to me, but could have. Yeah” (80s TV Ladies: Episode 309).
In regards to the script, one could argue that Lester’s blackmail scheme absolves Nicole of her decision to sleep with an underage boy since she fears being deported back to France, but that argument falls apart at the back end of Greenburg’s script when the two end up falling in love. The film portrays their love as “real,” like the love between consenting adults. Greenburg is gaslighting us. Now we’ve been groomed.
The subtext becomes text in the film’s resolution: During Philly’s first day of high school he runs into that teacher chaperone from the film’s opening scene, the one that caught him peeking into a girl’s bedroom during a house party. He thanks her for correcting his childish ways, and he wants to know if she’d like to discuss things further over dinner. Can his chauffeur pick her up this evening around, say, 7pm?
The teacher is momentarily shocked, then titillated, then coyly smiles and nods her head yes.
Private Lessons ends on a freeze frame of Philly smiling directly into the camera lens. His sexual awakening is complete. Director Alan Myerson holds that frame on screen for longer than you’re expecting. Maybe he’s hoping the character’s triumph distracts us from the unseemly things we’ve just watched.
Postscript: Why a 2.5-star rating for a not very good, morally objectionable movie? The answer is that it’s just so damn interesting to watch. Apparently the film’s first cut was drastically different, and darker, which test audiences did not like. Myerson went back and added more banter and pratfalls, and also included multiple long montages with rousing pop songs. No joke, the soundtrack for Private Lessons is a banger (John Cougar Mellencamp, Rod Stewart, Air Supply, Eric Clapton, and the aforementioned Earth, Wind, and Fire). It’s this editing re-direction that gives Private Lessons such a strange tone, in addition to its questionable morality. And speaking of that questionable morality, the filmmakers clearly knew they were doing something wrong. Production was staged in Arizona instead of California, to take advantage of the state’s lax child labor laws at the time. Eric Brown told the 80s TV Ladies podcast that 16-hour shooting schedules were not unusual, and that filming took place six days a week. When local Phoenix authorities were alerted of unsafe labor practices, including the exposure of sexual content to a child, the producers rented a warehouse in Albuquerque, New Mexico to quickly and clandestinely film all of the remaining illicit scenes that threatened to get them shut down.
