Why do so many school kids develop crushes on their teachers? After all, it’s practically a childhood rite-of-passage to pash on the people whose job it is to fill little cherubs up with as many pearls of wisdom as possible about right angles/poetry/frogs’ innards. Everyone I know has had either a secret or not-so-secret yen for their educators, although no-one has ever fallen for their geography teacher; geography teachers are never hot.

I never had a teacher as an object of my desire, which is very odd because I was bored half to death at school so would have welcomed the distraction, but unfortunately for me all the teachers at my alma mater smelt of biscuits, stale cigs and despair. On balance, not a winning combination, even for a hormotional teenager. Mind you, I more than made up for lost opps when I toddled off to uni where I had a major crush on one of my lecturers which I managed to get over by getting under him, which created quite the campus scandale but meant that coursework was a whole lot more pleasurable.

There’s less pleasure and more pain involved in the pupil-teacher relationship in the German-language Sasha. The pupil in question is the Cologne-based teenager Sasha (Saša Kekez) of the title who is something of a piano prodigy, a talent he’s only too willing to nurture because his Joanna teacher, Gebhard (Tim Bergmann), is especially easy on the eye and has certainly caught Sasha’s. Trouble is, Sasha is from a traditional Bosnian hetero-staunch family, led by brooding patriarch Vlado (Pedja Bjelec), where gayness isn’t it even a factor let alone a possible fact in their lives so he knows he must keep schtum about his real sexuality, even concocting a pretend girlfriend in the shape of his bezzie, Jiao (Yvonne Hung Hee).

Equally queer-averse but for different reasons is Sasha’s mum, Stanka (Željka Preksavec), who transfers all the hopes and dreams she once held so dear for her own future onto her two sons to fulfil; Sasha with his piano playing and for his brother, Boki (Jasin Mjumjunov), competitive rowing. However, when Gebhard decides to leave Cologne to pursue his teaching career in Vienna, Sasha decides that he must make his true feelings known not only to his teacher and his family and friends but, most importantly, to himself. With secrets and lies about to come cascading out of the closet, it creates the perfect toxic storm for plenty of high-octane drama.

Actually, the high dramatic tone of the film follows less the austere tropes and tics of traditional Teutonic cinema and is more of the Latin telenovela template – full-bodied, multi-narratived, vaguely hysterical, slightly camp, in other words. In fact, the pacing is so fast and loose that it makes Usain Bolt look a touch on the slow side. What is most impressive is how the layered plot is handled. It never runs away with itself or gets bogged down by its own story traffic; it always feels controlled, like it knows where it’s heading and how it’s going to get there.

This is down in no small part to the writing and direction care of Dennis Todorovic. While the script constantly teeters on the verge of a nervous breakdown, it’s always undercut with gently comedic exchanges that don’t so much leave you ROFL-ing but definitely raise a chuckle or two. Chief chuckle-generator is Vlado’s feckless brother, Pero (Ljubiša Lupo Grujičić), who has come to stay in their cramped city-centre apartment from the former Yugoslavia ostensibly to find work, but in reality starts the day with a few shots of grog and chain-smoked fags and then proceeds to spend his time ineptly doing DIY around the joint with the highlight being when he mistakes a bidet for a washbasin because he can’t comprehend the concept of a bum-cleaning device. Despite the screwball tomfoolery, his character does serve an important function inasmuch as he is the perfect foil for the movie’s darker moments as he provides some much-needed flashes of lightness amidst all the emotional heavy weather.

That’s where Todorovic excels: his ability to balance light and shade is so surefooted. Not only does he putty the plot expertly, which with its mille-feuille of sub-strands off-shooting wildly around the central story of Sasha’s coming out – Stanka’s sense of disappointment at her own failure to succeed as a concert pianist pushed on to her sons, Vlado’s long-discarded dreams of a basketball career, Jiao’s crush on Sasha, Boki’s crush on Jiao, Gedhard’s ex, Peter (Amo Kempf), declaring he’s still in love with him, Gedhard’s mixed feelings towards Sasha – is nothing to be sniffed at, but he also understands how to sketch out characters, even minor ones, so they leap from the script like fully-formed real human beings, not constructs trapped within a computer screen.

Sasha is one helluva melodramatic maelstrom of a movie that has an awful lot going on both plot- and character-wise. Actually, there’s so much going on it could have easily been a 12-hour TV series, but as it is it leaves you wanting more, daydreaming about what will happen to all the characters and their complicated, colliding lives. Yes, there are moments that lather up a tad too soap-operatically, notably the slo-mo shooting scene towards the end that is pure Dallas and Dynasty land, and the ending is too neatly tied-up with a bow, but they’re such niggly crits it’s like moaning about the colour of the hotel slippers on your dream holiday to the Maldives. A beautifully shot, beautifully acted, beautifully told story that stays with you long after the credits roll.

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Sasha [2010]
Studio: Peccadillo Pictures
Released: 30 January 2012
ASIN: B005YYAYSU 

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