PERSIAN LESSONS - Mark Reviews Movies

Persian Lesson, Cohen Media Group

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 15, 2023

In the final minutes of Persian Lessons, screenwriter Ilya Zofin and director Vadim Perelman offer some sense of the human toll in the backdrop of this story. It's set in a concentration camp over the course of about three years, where tens of thousands of people, just in this camp, die or are murdered by the Nazis in charge of it—either there or after being transported to one of the death camps in Poland. That number is simply an estimate from our protagonist, who survives this time and these conditions by way of an ingeniously impromptu but dangerous trick.

The trick becomes the focus of this movie, based on a short story by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, turning it into a thriller of such limited scope that it loses the sense of the horrors surrounding this clever man. Stories such as these are important to hear, if only because they offer some form of hope emerging from even the most unthinkable of evils, but the cost of this one, which more or less reduces the mass death of the Holocaust to a vague threat lingering in the background of this story, might be too much.

The main character is a Jewish Frenchman named Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), whose survival at the end of this tale is announced by way of a brief prologue. The actual story begins somewhere in Germany in 1942, as Gilles is on a truck with others captives of the Nazis. The transport stops in near a hill at the edge of a forest, where one group is ordered to walk forward. After their captors shoot that group, the rest are ordered to do the same.

Gilles falls to the ground before the gunfire, and before being executed on the spot, he announces that he is someone of Persian background. It's the only thing he could think to say, since Gilles had just traded a fellow captive for a book in the Persian language in exchange for half a sandwich. Purely by chance, an officer at a nearby concentration camp has been looking for someone who fits that description, so instead of being killed with the others, Gilles is brought to the camp with that officer, named Koch (Lars Eidinger) and hoping to learn the Persian language so he can move to Tehran when the war is finished.

The setup relies on so much luck and coincidence that we simply have to accept it for the rest of the plot to possess any level of credulity. That the premise also makes those groups of others into nameless, mostly faceless victims, who aren't either fortunate or smart enough to fall into and come up with such a plan, adds a layer of unintentional distastefulness that's also one of the unfortunate side effects of stories that focus exclusively on someone like Gilles. That countless more mostly nameless and faceless victims are killed or moved to their deaths in the background as the narrative unfolds here only adds to that feeling.

Ignoring all of that as much as possible, Gilles' story becomes a battle of wits between him and Koch. By the way, the Nazi officer also happens to be the most detailed and complicated character in the story—a choice that's theoretically fascinating but comes across as another misstep in this particular narrative.

Gilles, who adopts the name Reza to go along with a handwritten inscription in the book, convinces Koch enough for the Nazi to schedule lessons in the Persian language in the evenings. Since Gilles doesn't know a word of that language, he devises a fake form of "Farsi" off the top of his head and, later, by condensing the names of the people he meets in the camp.

As an isolated thriller revolving around conviction and persuasion, this tale is somewhat convincing, especially when it does focus on the relationship between "Reza," who becomes so invested in his made-up language that he becomes fluent in it, and Koch, a man who is so petty in his way of thinking that violence is inevitable consequence when afforded such power. That pettiness is a common characteristic of the Nazi soldiers and officers at the camp, who become involved in love triangles and start spreading rumors about each other as if they're jealous adolescents. The notion is a potent one about such a commonplace mindset resulting in such evil, to be sure. In the bigger picture, though, every scene with one of these captors feels as if it's taking away from the stories of those they have unjustly imprisoned and are systematically murdering.

Essentially, there's a clear imbalance in this story—partly because it's unavoidable, given that this is a survivor's tale, but mostly on account of some misguided priorities on the part of the filmmakers. The epilogue of Persian Lessons does make an impact, although that's mainly because it genuinely acknowledges the bigger story eluding the movie until that point.

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