Plato’s Academy was one of the classical era’s principal sanctuaries of education, a refuge in which young scholars could develop their minds under the tutelage of renowned philosophical masters. It was also, in keeping with the ancient Greek practice of pederastic mentorship, a place for teachers to poach their students for sexual conquests, a predatory system that was seen as part and parcel of the instructive process. Such academic iniquity persists in José Luis Guerín’sThe Academy of Muses, a dialectically focused drama which finds its conflict amid the deepest recesses of academia, detailing the pitched battles between a romantically minded, old-fashioned professor and his mostly female students, who serve as both competitors in debate and fodder for his extra-marital liaisons. These students constitute the titular muses, a term that also applies to the subject of the professor’s course, which charts the effect of female influence through Italian mythology and medieval literature, with a specific focus on poetic objects of desire.
On one side of this conflict is Raffaele Pinto, a real-life professor at the University of Barcelona, here playing a fictionalized version of himself. The film opens in media res, in the thick of one of these lectures, which like most of the classroom scenes captured here quickly develops into a spirited dispute, generally focused around the students taking issue with his archaic perspective on sexual politics. As depicted by Guerín, these scenes play out in a tight shot/reverse-shot pattern that recalls a vigorous game of tennis, as Raffaele pontificates and his students parry back, often taking issue with the structural underpinnings of the course itself. Raffaele, of course, always has the final word, a dominance that extends to his practice of cultivating relationships with the students, first under the guise of tutelage, then developing into something closer to the feminine inspiration he hopes to explore in the class itself. Meanwhile, at home, Raffaele’s wife is becoming increasingly aware of his infidelities, an issue she never directly raises, but which gets conveyed through more roundabout discussion, the actual topic at hand always lurking just a bit beneath the surface.
All this heady dialectic can become a bit impenetrable, a fact not necessarily helped by Guerín’s shooting style, which prizes faux-documentary naturalism, working through car windshields and pressed in tight zooms on his subject’s faces, as if surreptitiously monitoring them from just outside their purview. A heavy use of jump cuts, meanwhile, seems intended to further develop the faux-documentary aesthetic, indicating a rough handling of collected footage. These qualities all dissipate during a mid-movie sojourn to Sardinia, where Raffaele briefly disappears, ceding control of the movie to a student named Emanuela (Emanuela Forgetta), who’s seen physically carrying out the filming process herself, and who embarks on an ill-fated fling with a local shepherd. Here the movie pushes away from its modern-by-way-of-medieval focus into the realm of a hazy agrarian past, with explanations of the rustic history of music, complete with demonstrations by a trio of shepherd singers, who perform an ancient form of improvised vocal song creation, approximating the melded sounds of cows, sheep, and the wind.
The tweaked format of this section makes it possible to view Guerín’s overbearing tactics as the hand of the film’s creator overtly showing itself; just as Raffaele exerts his will over the classroom, Guerín does so over the footage at hand. Such an imposition ultimately creates an interesting four-way conflict between two male arbiters, two sets of subjugated female victims, who seem less and less willing to take this abuse lying down. The results are not quite dense but more than a bit difficult, a specialized take on the sort of academic continuum of conversation found in films like Wiseman’s At Berkeley, specifically in its portrayal of the continuum of conversation, flowing from teacher to student, here propelled into a multifarious hall of mirrors structure that dramatizes teacher-student relations and masculine egotism via an eccentric, often inscrutable comedy of manners.
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