Persian Lessons: Miseducating a Nazi
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
The challenge of Holocaust narratives is finding an indirect way to represent something that’s unspeakable. In the film Persian Lessons, the model is that of Scheherazade, the fictional princess in the Mideastern story collection One Thousand and One Nights, who used storytelling to prolong her life.
The year is 1942, and Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is on a truck carrying Jewish prisoners from France to a Germany transit camp. A fellow prisoner trades him a half sandwich for a book of Persian stories. Although all the other passengers are shot shortly after the truck reaches German transit camp, Gilles escapes death, using the book as evidence that he’s not Jewish, but Persian. He adopts a name, Riza, which has been inscribed on the flyleaf of the book.
By what can only be described as a magical coincidence, the camp’s deputy commander, Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger), dreams of opening a restaurant in Tehran with his brother after the war and is looking for a Farsi tutor. He arranges for Gilles/Riza to take a relatively soft job in the kitchen by day, while teaching him Farsi in the evenings.
Though Gilles knows nothing about the language, he begins inventing words, teaching the SS officer to speak nonsense sentences and even to wonder at the beauty of its poetry. Eventually, Gilles begins relying on names of prisoners in a logbook as a mnemonic device to create his fake Farsi vocabulary.
Eidinger, as the preening, paranoid, and hot-tempered officer, and Pérez Biscayart, as the small, scruffy, wily captive, are both strong actors, capable of finding a pulse of humanity in their stereotypical roles. The script ratchets up the tension by having Koch threatening his captive and losing his temper.
When Riza accidentally uses the same invented word to mean both “tree” and “bread,” he gets a severe beating and is sent to work crushing rocks. Not only a raving, antisemitic, pathological bully, Koch also has an irrational hatred for homonyms.
Expanding beyond the victim-persecutor duo, there’s a subplot about jealous lower officers, sexual tensions between male and female guards, and something vaguely like comic relief. All of this risks making Persian Lessons feel like the pilot for a workplace dramedy.
When Koch is confronted by his commander that there’s a rumour the Persian is Koch’s lover, he responds by informing him that there’s also a rumour the commander has a small penis. Because, really, that’s what you would say to your Nazi commanding officer.
The director is Vadim Perelman, a Ukrainian-born, Canadian-educated filmmaker best known for his 2003 breakthrough film House of Sand and Fog, and the 2007 school shooting drama, The Life Before Her Eyes. Though his film is described as “inspired by a true story,” the claim is misleading. The script, by Ilja Zofin, is based on a 1997 short story, The Invention of a Language by veteran German screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase.
By the end, Gilles’s ability to survive while his fellow inmates are murdered around him is given a redemptive twist and the almost sympathetic Nazi also gets his appropriate reward. Yet, even with its decent performances and polished production values, Persian Lessons never clears the hurdle of its improbable premise, an idea that could serve as the setup for a bad-taste Mel Brooks’ sketch.
Persian Lessons. Directed by Vadim Perelman. Written by Ilya Zofin, based on a story by Wolfgang Kohlhaase Starring Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Lars Eidinger. Opens July 16 in Toronto (Varsity and Empress Walk) and Vancouver’s Fifth Avenue Theatres, on June 23 in Ottawa and Edmonton and throughout the summer in other cities.