Lindsay Burdge as Diana (Oscilloscope:Laboratories)

A high school teacher punctuates the banality of her daily routine—commuting to work, administering her classroom, jogging, etc.—by banging a student. We begin with the teacher, Diana (Lindsay Burdge), in her car commuting to work. Then we join Diana and senior Eric (Will Brittain) for a quickie in the same car.  This oscillation between the banal habitus of a Texan suburbanite and the morally questionable intercourse continues, with virtually no story, dialogue and plot development, until the end, when Diana is called into the principal’s office to face the consequences of her actions. Viewers are reminded of that gut-dropping feeling of being called into the principal’s office, but will laugh sardonically when remembering that this is a 30-something-year-old woman who has been acting like an immature teen.

It’s a grueling hour and a half to watch lukewarm and meaningless sex between two people who, one cannot shake the feeling, do not belong together in the first place. This moral notion is finally realized by the teacher, who momentarily calls off the affair for fear of losing her job in scandal. Her underlying moral feeling is apparent in one last sex scene in which she interrupts the action in a confused state of paralysis. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she tells the student. Yet she cannot shake her obsession with him, which is fueled by distant memories of teenage innocence.

In one of the only verbal exchanges between teacher and student, Diana reminisces about when she was a teen—having sex with her first boyfriend—just like here, in a car. At a dance she chaperons, she gawks at her student’s teenaged date—acting as if she herself were a jealous teen. It’s a sad portrait of a woman in denial of her own age, or perhaps more accurately, a woman who has “grown up” without ever really maturing. She is a lackluster character, to say the least. If not compelling, the most understandable character is, somewhat surprisingly, Eric, who simply realizes a little fantasy apropos being “hot for teacher,” in the words of David Lee Roth.

This film represents an illicit sexual affair that happens precisely, as the teacher suggests, through her thoughtlessness, and the anti-climactic ending reflects the anti-climactic nature of the affair, throughout which there is virtually no dialogue to substantiate and to support the sexual relationship. It’s precisely the lack of dialogue that supports the superficial relationship while pointing out its impossibility by exposing a maturity gap that necessitates a different, nonsexual type of interaction.

0ne would at least expect something interesting with regard to how their interaction first elevates into sex, but, even there, the audience is disappointed. About halfway through, viewers realize that the two probably first met through an Internet meet-up site (which, as everyone knows, is most often used to meet casual sex partners). And then, upon realizing each other’s identities, the teacher goes forward with it. Why? Simple sex drive is not enough to explain it.

Is this film a comment of a banal Texas suburb and the ills that such technologies as Grindr or Blendr embody? No, as there is nothing in these technologies that should compel anyone to move forward with an inappropriate relationship—as would have become clear through dialogue. At least Diana’s withholding from such a dialogue is her own self-indictment. The fact that she is a northeastern girl corrupting a red-blooded Texan suburb feeds into political currents like a cheap copy from a Murdoch playbook, and insofar as the plot contains political bias, it’s paltry. Moral questions of sex between an adult and a minor remain unexplored. Instead the relationship represented onscreen has the audience simply wondering “When is this going to end?”