FirstLoveMovies

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0231599/

The film opens in 1969. A series of static shots establish the environs of a local school as the dominant, and physically containing, institution for education. We move into a classroom where a reading lesson is taking place. In the middle of the classroom is Laura Wyatt holding a book, ironically it's Look and Learn and she is doing neither, seemingly anxious and distracted that she may be asked out in the front of the class to read aloud. Bennett cuts back to the austere establishing shot of the school, combining this with an equally anxious soundtrack of piano and sinister synths, as the diminutive figure of Laura leaves, to be followed moments later by a worried teacher. School as an educational institution is coded as threatening and unsympathetic.

Her parents Sally and Barry (Rynagh O'Grady and Derrick O'Connor) are summoned. Sally is pregnant with Michael, the other child who will figure centrally in the story, and Leland again emphasises the roles of parents, teachers, education officers and ultimately the police and the courts have in forming young lives from the moment they are born. There is a particular moment where Sally, distressed about her missing daughter, stands in the empty classroom looking at the rows and rows of empty desks, a vision that sees Leland's recurring idea of how education impacts on a series of generations reintroduced. Barry's factory foreman has a conversation, presumably informing him of Laura's flight from school, that we are unable to hear due to the din of the factory floor, a temporary deafness that reflects the Wyatts' discovery of their daughter's own deafness, brought on after sleepless nights and instances of bedwetting and traumatic attempts to return her to school.