By Angelo Muredda

Argentine filmmaker Diego Lerman makes a satisfying if derivative riff on To Sir, With Love (1967) with El Suplente, a slow-burning social-realist drama about an educator in Buenos Aires caught between teaching, administrative inertia, and activism. Juan Minujín brings a rumpled, low-key charisma to his role as Lucio, the eponymous substitute, an author and literature teacher struggling to live up to his dying father’s reputation as a beloved community organizer by channelling his own dormant Good Samaritan energies into a classroom full of high school students failed by bureaucracy and preyed upon by the local drug kingpin and his lieutenants. 

The story is well-trodden territory, evoking any number of earnest, unambitious melodramas about a middle-class interloper finding his faith in the humanities and pedagogical predispositions challenged by a class of under-privileged students who think literature is useless. Though comparable works like Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (2008) and Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar (2011) are never far from our memory, Lerman’s solid craftsmanship and regional specificity brings a bit of spark and aesthetic interest to familiar territory. His evocative compositions and absorbing long takes are more than the sum of their Dardenne brothers-derived parts. Lerman also makes the most of Minujín’s worry-lined face in close-up, the actor’s innate sensitivity and warmth filling in the blanks of a character who might otherwise be something of a cypher—a supply teacher learning how to lay permanent roots outside of himself.