Persian Lessons
Another timeless tale of the Holocaust, filled with degradation and unexpected joy, as a French Jew pretends to be Persian -- even inventing a fake language -- to save himself from Nazi genocide.
Some people get tired of certain types of films, most notably superhero movies currently. For me, I only get tired of a subject or theme when the creators start running out of ideas and repeating themselves, or obviously aren’t investing as much creatively into the effort.
This has even extended to films about the Holocaust. Though World War II was arguably the most pivotal event in human history, and the most bracing moral example to following generations, there is a certain subset of filmgoers whose eyes glaze over at the mere mention of another picture centered on the Nazi genocide of Jews.
What more can you say that hasn’t been said?, seems to be the reasoning. As it turns out: plenty, as seen in the absorbing new drama, “Persian Lessons,” adapted from a short story by Wolfgang Kohlhaase but based on true events.
Nahuel Pérez Biscayart plays Gilles, a French Jew caught up in the German net in 1942. When his group is summarily executed, he manages to survive and convinces the soldiers he is Persian, using a book of mythology he had just traded for a sandwich to convince them.
This is important because a deputy commandant of their concentration camp has instructed them to be on the lookout for Persians. Gilles, taking the name of Reza, is taken before Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger) and offered a deal: if the faux Persian will teach him the Farsi language, he will be allowed to live and given a relatively comfortable job in the camp kitchen.
You can see the obvious quandary: how can Gilles/Reza teach Koch a language he does not himself speak? Asked to say something in the moment, he spouts some gibberish he claims to be a line of poetry. But if he is to teach five new words every day, he must not only create a fake language but remember it himself.
Koch is in charge of the kitchens, having been a chef before the war. After it is over, he wants to emigrate to Tehran, where his brother fled in something of a disgrace. The Nazi officer believes the war will last at least two more years, and curiously his calculations seem to be based on the assumption Germany will lose.
Making things even harder for Reza, the soldier who first turned him in, Max (Jonas Nay), is convinced he’s lying. He only did it to receive a bribe of tins of meat from Koch’s rich personal stash of food. Max figures he can better himself even more by showing the officer he’s being made a fool of.
Max enlists Elsa (Leonie Benesch), a female soldier working in the kitchen, to help prove Reza’s duplicity. She is motivated in part because Koch humiliated her by replacing her with Reza for the prime duty of keeping the books of all prisoners who enter and leave the camp. (Her penmanship is atrocious.) Also, she and Max have been dancing around a flirtation for some time now, and this partnership helps moves things along.
Reza, seemingly doomed, stumbles upon a mnemonic device for his invented Farsi language: using a portion of each new prisoner’s name as another word in the vocabulary. He does this based on some characteristic of that prisoner to remind him: angry, beard, sad, etc.
Director Vadim Perelman and screenwriter Ilya Tsofin keep the tension at a fever pitch, so it never seems like Reza is truly safe. Something like a… friendship isn’t the right word, but at least an understanding grows between him and Koch. He is treated more kindly and hidden away on a farm for a few days when all of the prisoners are moved on to the extermination camps, and even given treats from Koch’s pantry.
Most interestingly, as the Persian lessons go on the pair begin to have entire conversations in this new, invented language. Reza/Gilles comes across initially as calculating, someone just trying to save his own neck. But over time he uses his influence on Koch to subtly nudge his behavior and help his fellow prisoners.
Koch is hardly a sympathetic figure, but we get close enough to him to understand his motivations and realize he is trying to navigate a dangerous, complicated environment and, like Reza, secure the best outcome for himself. At one point he insists he is not a murderer to Reza, who points out that feeding the killers is not much of an improvement.
“Persian Lessons” is full of pain and degradation, as any story of the Holocaust must be, but also great humanity and unexpected joy. Those who survived the death camps did through extraordinary strength of will and body — the real superheroes of this last century.