‘Persian Lessons’ Review: A Fable — Beautifully Acted — Set In a Concentration Camp

Appearing without much fanfare among the bigger, flashier and more idiotic summer entries, Persian Lessons is a small German-Russian co-production I found superior to the rest of what I’ve been suffering through lately. Expertly mounted, beautifully acted and meticulously detailed, it’s another harrowing Holocaust drama in the line of endless films about World War II, notable primarily as a rare entry in the filmography of Vadim Perelman, the highly regarded director of House of Sand and Fog. 

Set in Nazi-occupied France in 1942, the story begins when a young French Jew named Reza, the son of a Belgian rabbi, is captured by the Germans and forced into a truck on its way to a concentration camp and certain death by firing squad. On the road, he gets into a conversation with another starving passenger and sympathetically trades half of his sandwich for a book of Persian folk tales. The act is seemingly pointless, but it ends up saving his life.

Reza insists he’s not a Jew but a Persian, nobody believes him, but by sheer luck, it turns out that an SS commandant in the camp named Koch is looking for a Persian to teach him Farsi. Koch, who worked as a chef before the war, doesn’t know a single word in Farsi but needs to learn enough vocabulary to open a German restaurant in Teheran after the war. Reza doesn’t know how to speak Farsi either, but bravely pretends he does, using the words in the book he acquired on the truck, hatching a clever plan to invent a language of his own. Koch rewards him with better food from the kitchen reserved for the officers, and rescues him from savage beatings and manual labor in the stone quarry in exchange for Persian lessons, unaware that Reza is making it all up, using the same word in Farsi for both “bread” and “tree.” The movie is too long and too slow, but the premise is intriguing enough to hold interest. I would have liked it more if it was a true story, not a fable, but still . . . today, if a movie is even weakly engaging, it’s a cause for rejoicing.

Chief among the flaws in Persian Lessons is the director’s tendency to slow down the narrative by spending an inordinate amount of time showing people shoveling snow, slicing bread, and wandering away from the central plot to illustrate the conflicts among Reza’s fellow prisoners, the jealousies and resentments among the German officers, and the brutality in the barracks. Too many characters with unclear motives need more definition, and the inferred erotic obsession that develops between Koch, the Nazi captor, and Reza, his Jewish prisoner, seems particularly contrived.

Nahuel Perez Biscakyan, an actor from Argentina who works in French films, is very good as the tortured Reza, but although the movie centers on the things he does to survive, his character is under-developed. As the role of Koch  expands, we actually learn more about the German commandant, wonderfully played by Lars Eidinger. The surprise ending, when the tables turn and we see what happens to Koch when he tries to apply what he learned about his Persian lessons to his advantage in leaving the country, is devastating.   Not a great film, but in many ways extraordinary, unpredictable, and memorable.         

Observer Reviews are regular assessments of new and noteworthy cinema.