The wildly misguided My Oxford Year

When I studied English literature at Oxford about two decades ago, the issue of tutor-student relations was a vexed one. On the one hand – so the reasoning went – students were adults, over the age of consent and entitled to make their own decision as to whether they wanted to indulge in sexual congress with the men and women responsible for inculcating a knowledge and, hopefully, love of their subject into them. On the other, there were clear – although sometimes blurred – conflicts of interest relating to these invariably older figures also on occasion being responsible for marking their favored students’ examinations.

It was a bold man who declared – as one world-famous member of the English faculty did to a friend’s girlfriend during my time there – “sleep with me and you’ll get a First.” Most advances were less brazen than that. I remember one academic shyly but decisively forcing me into the corner at the end of one tutorial and asking if I wished to accompany him to a play in London – Journey’s End, for what it’s worth – and the same academic remarking to my tutorial partner, “I’m only 44, and a penniless academic, but I have the world to offer you.” At the time, it seemed somewhere between creepy and pathetic. Now, with 44 only a few months away for me, it seems like nothing less than a cry of frustration at a world of permissiveness that had escaped that particular don.

Today, things are very different. They’d have to be, post-#MeToo and the like. The university’s code of conduct states sternly that, “To protect the welfare of students, and in the best interests of staff, the University prohibits staff from entering into an intimate relationship with a student for whom they have any responsibility.” There is some wriggle room, however slight – Oxford merely “strongly discourages any other close personal relationship between a staff member and student for whom they have any responsibility that transgresses the boundaries of professional conduct, and requires such relationships to be declared” – but in other words such things are kaput, verboten, sayonara. Got it?

The makers of the new Netflix movie, My Oxford Year, do not seem to have received the memo, and the results are jaw-dropping. The film, based on the popular novel by Julia Whelan, appears at first glance to be solidly in the Emily in Paris tradition. Swap Lily Collins’s wide-eyed ingenue for Sofia Carson’s Anna De La Vega, newly arrived in Oxford and keen to make her mark on this picturesque and historic city, and throw in a light dusting of romance with what the press release coyly calls “a charming local who changes both their lives,” and you would seem to have one of the romantic comedy hits of the year on the streaming service’s hands when the film launches on Netflix in August.

There’s only one problem, but it’s a big one. The “charming local,” the excellently named Corey Mylchreest – a veteran of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story – is, according to the film’s trailer, none other than Jamie Davenport, who serves as Anna’s unfeasibly good-looking and preposterously youthful tutor. As soon as she sets eyes on him, the predictable sparks fly – allowing her newly acquired GBF to say, “Flirting with the hot teacher on the first day? I love it! That is a serious bit of crumpet” – and the dynamic between academic and student is less the decorous quasi-homosexual longing of Brideshead Revisited (“No, Charles! Not the plover’s eggs!”) and more tastefully filmed consummation that suggests that Anna is visited, and indeed revisited, by her tutor repeatedly.

There are jokes about Jamie’s supposed gaggle of other adoring female students (“if a harem is anything, they’re patient”) and lots of tourist board-friendly shots of Oxford’s libraries, complete with “dusty old first editions,” and kissing in the rain. Yet from the moment that the embarrassed-looking tutor declares that their relationship is “just fun,” I had a moment of “oh, here we go.” He is shown – red flag alert! – reading Sylvia Plath’s Ariel while embracing his younger lover, and declaring, grimly, “Poetry can be taught, but really it should be tried.” I’ve seen Oleanna, David Mamet’s brilliant, brutal play about academic-student power relations, and I know how these things pan out. I readied myself for the scenes of Jamie’s exposure, the inevitable arrest, the court case, disgrace, the whole shebang.

Not a bit of it. Unless the film’s marketing is being spectacularly disingenuous, the major division between the star-crossed lovers is not that the tutor has groomed the student, but that Anna is only in Oxford for a year – hence the film’s title. Admittedly, there are hints at a Dark Secret in Jamie’s life, but it seems to have something to do with having lots and lots of money – cue Bridgerton-esque scenes of stately homes – and the knowledge that “some things are just broken.” With sledgehammer subtlety, we then see Jamie break a vase. The tagline to the film declares “To truly live, live every moment” It might as well have said “To truly live, commit a sex crime with a younger woman, in this climate, and get away with it.”

The film’s director is Iain Morris, who was responsible for co-creating The Inbetweeners, the scabrous and very funny British comedy about a gang of frustrated misfit teenagers. I have the faintest of hopes that he has smuggled something truly outrageous under the noses of his Netflix paymasters – Lolita for those expecting Sex Education – but I fear, instead, that this is one of the most clueless and misjudged attempts at romantic comedy-drama ever put on screen. Expect controversy aplenty next month. Still, the Oxford locations look attractive, at least. We must be thankful for such small mercies.