Starring: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Lars Eidinger, Jonas Nay
Distributor: Madman Films
Runtime: 127 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2021
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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A young Belgian Jew survives a concentration camp by pretending to be Iranian and offering the commandant lessons in Farsi. Persian Lessons is an unexpected title for a film about Nazis, Jews and concentration camps during World War II. It states that it is based on a true story. It screened during the Jewish International Film Festival earlier this year. While the story itself is intriguing, the film is shows the callousness of the ordinary German soldiers, men and women, whose duty and loyalty to Hitler, means mass murder. They kill without any strong sense of destroying another human being. Argentinian actor Biscayart is Gilles, a son of a rabbi, imprisoned in Belgium, allegedly to be transported but actually to be shot. In the back of the truck, he encounters another prisoner who is starving who begs him for his sandwich. He does give it and receives in return a book in Farsi that the other prisoner had picked up after a Persian family had been taken. Gilles is shrewd and is able to survive for some time in the camp, producing the book, claiming that it was his, and that he had Persian ancestry. As it happens, one of the officers commanding (a mixture of the cruel and the foolish), Koch (Eidinger), remembers his brother who refused to join the Nazi party and went to open a restaurant in Teheran. Koch wants to learn Farsi in order to go to Teheran after the war. Gilles offers a wonderful opportunity for him to learn the language. On the one hand, there is a lot of farce as Gilles, sometimes with difficulty, especially in remembering the language and words he is creating, agrees to teach Koch Farsi, a few words at a time, then many words. Koch has sacked the female officer who was copying the names of prisoners into the register and Gilles gets the job, working part-time in the kitchen as well, living in the barracks. This means that the audience sees the range of life in the concentration camp from the points of view of the officials, the workers, life in the barracks, as well as the hardships of the quarries. Needless to say, there are some close shaves but Gilles devises a clever way of inventing words by taking the first part of the surname of the prisoners and nominating a meaning. With ups and downs, this continues for several years until the allies advance on the camp, Gilles finally taking on his Jewish identity and marching away with the condemned, Koch disguising himself and there are some funny sequences, as might be anticipated, as he tries to talk to Allied officials with his years of learning Farsi vocabulary. There must always be stories of World War II, of the Holocaust – this one is certainly arresting and rather different.
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