Norwegian melodrama. Original title: Se Meg. (See me.)

Eva is a popular teacher who is married to the local mayor. Although he has betrayed her trust, she still plans to support his election campaign, and so she starts to volunteer at a local refugee center. Here, she grows close to eighteen-year-old refugee Amir, who charms her with his poetic talents. But the closer they get, the less control she has over the situation. A drama about forbidden love, Don’t Call Me Mama confronts its protagonists with a moral test while provocatively exploring how hypocrisy can masquerade as generosity.

Man, when the teacher would write “see me” on my homework, it very rarely meant that she wanted to sip on my love-straw. It usually meant that I had to stay after class and do something vile, like cleaning the wrestling mats. There could be two explanations for this: (1) I had no … er … poetic talents; (2) my female teachers were nuns.

One example of my “see me” incidents:

In my book I consolidated three “slow learner” kids into one character called Larry Monroe, and I attributed this anecdote to the consolidated character, but it really happened to a kid named Stuart Mackie. Stu was a likable enough fellow who had somehow managed to make it to the seventh grade in a Catholic school, although he had the mental development of a six-year-old. He was more than six feet tall, and about twice the weight of the next largest kid in the class. Since he never caused any disruptions, the teachers just sort of ignored him, and occasionally advanced him to the next grade, although he never managed to master the previous year’s material. I guess they didn’t know what else to do with him. If he had gone into the public school system, he would have been picked up in “the short bus” every morning and transported quite far from home to a “special” school that was run as a co-operative program by several school systems, with financial assistance from New York State. The Catholic schools had no such program, so Stu just sat quietly in various classrooms and did what he was told, as best he could, for 11 or 12 years, or however long it took him to graduate. (I wasn’t in his class until 7th and 8th grade, when he had finally been held back enough times to become my classmate.)

The nun in 7th grade said she would stand on her head if Stuart Mackie ever passed a spelling test. Forget about passing! There was no way he could get even a single word right on a seventh grade spelling test, since by that stage the words had evolved beyond “cat” and “dog.” But I had a plan. I would sit opposite him, and when we “switched papers” to correct each others work, as was the standard procedure, I would alter Stu’s answers, get him 100%, and see what the nun had under her habit.

She caught me altering his answers, whereupon she took my own spelling test away from Stu, marked it a zero and wrote “see me after school” on it.

Needless to say, I did not get the same treatment as the kid in this movie. I was assigned “permanent detention,” a category that was created just for me!

You may think I fabricate these Catholic school horror stories, and some of them are exaggerated a bit, but that one is true exactly as written. Stuart is a real person. You can see him in my 8th Grade Graduation picture. (As if he could “graduate.” It’s fun to pretend. I’m sure the nuns were just thrilled that he was finally gone.) You could probably guess that he is on the top left. He was a full-grown adult at the time. I am the third kid from the left in that row, with only one kid separating me and Stu. I was about 5’7″ at the time, so I suppose Stu was something like 6’2″, 220 pounds, possibly even larger. He was a terror to tackle at British Bulldog.

Anyway, back to the pervy Norwegian movie …

Videos

The entire film is online free (with ads) on Daily Motion.