Review of My Oxford Year, directed by Iain Morris

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

Once upon a time I worked as a film critic professionally at an outlet, and I did that for about three years before departing to work on this blog and another opportunity that unfortunately did not pan out. During that time though I watched a ton of new releases to the point where I was kind of burned out of watching everything new, and I didn’t watch anything I actually wanted to see that was older.

So when I was during this unemployed time I was spending it catching up on all the movies I’ve been missing out on over the years. I wasn’t keeping with the new releases unless it was an Asian drama on Viki or Netflix, and I dutifully post my reviews of those shows.

However, I kept getting fed ads for My Oxford Year, and it seemed interesting to me. For some reason though I completely missed the fact this was a student-professor relationship throughout the movie; I had never heard of the source material going into this, so it was like going in almost completely blind what it was about.

And boy do I have some opinions. Let’s get into the review and summary portion of this post!

A student from New York City, while studying abroad in England, falls for her professor—but there are some major complications.

Our main character in this movie is Anna De La Vega, who’s a Latina living in Queens with her immigrant family. It becomes a source of pride when she’s accepted to go study at Oxford in England for a year, and when she steps foot onto English soil and the Oxford campus, it’s like a dream come true.

Until professor Jamie Davenport runs over a puddle and splashes her. This angers Anna, but when she shows up to her literature class the next day, she discovers he’s her professor and rebukes his effort to give her a slice of cake along with the other students. Things change slowly between them though when they hang out together during Anna’s first ever experience in a pub.

Anna, feeling like Jamie has rejected her towards the end of the night, dances with another guy, but the next day Jamie shows her a book that’s pretty special. They end up having sex after that, but when they actually sit down and try to define what their relationship is, they decide it’s more casual. Anna is weary, too, when one of Jamie’s friends tells her to stay away from him.

Time passes, and they continue their little romantic dance. Jamie invites Anna over to his personal home, where he tells her about his dead brother Eddie and his estranged father. When she wakes up the next morning, she finds Jamie cold, then doesn’t seem him for some time. Her friends she’s made so far go to a boat race with her, where she worries about him.

She decides to go to his house afterwards, suspecting he’s with Cecilia, the friend from before who warned her, but finds Jamie receiving medical treatment for something. He’s upset to see her there at his place, but later they have another honest conversation. Cecilia turns out to be his dead brother’s girlfriend, and his brother died of cancer. Jamie now has the same cancer.

He wants Anna to go live her life independent of him, but she rebukes him and tells him that he shouldn’t be noble in a situation like this and die alone. The next big event is a ball that Jamie invites her too: there, Jamie’s parents arrive, and Anna has a conversation with his dad. He wants Jamie to come home and get better treatment. Jamie doesn’t want that, but collapses and has to be brought to the hospital. His father comes but does not go inside.

Anna’s birthday approaches, and Jamie invites her to the castle he grew up in. When she arrives alone, she finds all of her friends there for a party. They celebrate. As Jamie gets sicker, his father tries to talk to him about new treatments, but he doesn’t want to try it and prolong his suffering. Anna also is told that his brother died in that castle, and watches as Jamie and his father reconnect in the hospital.

Her friends also find out about the cancer. She finally admits to Jamie that she loves him, and tells her parents she’s staying in England indefinitely, sacrificing the job she had lined up. Jamie is upset by her decision and they fight, leaving Anna to decide that this is the wrong decision.

By the time she graduates, she still has not spoken to him, but they reconcile after it and have sex. However, the very next morning Jamie is clearly very sick. She takes him to the hospital, where the doctor looks at him and tells her he has pneumonia and it’s severe.

Jamie’s dad finally acknowledges what Jamie wants and refuses the treatment for him. Anna holds Jamie as he dies. The movie ends in the future, where Anna travels around Europe, furthers her education, and then teaches the class that Jamie once taught at Oxford.

Overall Thoughts

As a movie, this is just okay for me. I feel like we’ve seen this plot line before a thousand times, and I didn’t find anything really special about these characters that made me feel super invested in their story. Yes, it was sad, but at the same time it didn’t really give me a chance personally to connect with them beyond the romance and the tragedy of it.

At the same time: I thought this movie was indeed problematic because he is a professor and she a student. I think the YouTuber Kaelyn Grace Apple has an excellent video about this movie and why she is boycotting it; I knew before she put that video out that she, and many others, were sexually assaulted by male professors at Oxford University and that Oxford’s policy on professor-student relationships was terrible.

Go watch that video, but I agree with the sentiment that there’s an uneven power dynamic going on with these kinds of relationships. I also don’t find the basis for these two characters’ relationship to be strong at all, which probably also feeds into my opinion that this can be problematic. Maybe if they met in a setting where they weren’t a student being taught by the guy this wouldn’t be as problematic.

All in all: I say watch it if you’re interested and form your own opinions. However, this can be seen as controversial in some ways.

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