Cao Zhen

caozhen0806@126.com

WWII Nazi movies with stories told in unique perspectives always impress audience members, leaving us to think about human nature in this dark period of human history. Acclaimed titles include “Life Is Beautiful” (1997), “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” (2008) and “The Captain” (2017).

Now we have “Persian Lessons,” directed by Ukrainian-born and Canada-based Vadim Perelman.

In 1942, young Jewish man Gilles (played by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is arrested by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi-occupied France and sent to a transit camp. He narrowly avoids execution by swearing to the guards that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him because a Nazi officer in the camp named Koch is looking for someone to teach him Farsi (Persian). Gilles, who presents himself as Reza, invents his own version of “Farsi” to teach Koch. As he gains trust from Koch who protects him from being executed time and time again, one night, a real Persian is transferred to the camp ...

What makes this movie enthralling is that Gilles needs to memorize thousands of words made up of gibberish and one slip-up in his memory means death, so he borrows the root words of the Jews’ names in the endless prisoner log for his self-invented Persian vocabulary.

And this made-up language acts as an irony in many ways in this movie. For example, Koch requires neat handwriting for the prisoner log but he seems to never really look at it carefully, so he isn’t aware that the “Persian” words he unwittingly memorizes every day are actually Jewish prisoners’ names. And after taking a few lessons, Koch recites a self-written “Persian” poem on peace but he doesn’t know his beautiful poem is made up of the Holocaust victims’ names.

In the movie, the “Persian” language means future and freedom for Koch because he, who is in charge of the kitchen in the Nazi camp, dreams of opening a restaurant in Tehran after the war, but for Gilles, “Persian” means suffering because behind each name there was a victim. Memorizing nonexistent words is a powerful metaphor for the need to preserve our collective memory of the Holocaust.

“Persian Lessons” focuses less on the cruel scenes as we see in other related movies like “Schindler’s List,” but more on the complex inner world of Gilles as a survivor in a strange position, Koch’s passion for Persian and his restaurant dream, and the unusual human relationship between the two.

Although some twists and turns in the movie are not quite convincing, the two leading actors’ performances are exceptional, making the movie an engaging watch. The majority of the dialogues are in German, and in the nonsensical language created by Gilles, but we can still sense the fear and trauma under Gilles’ calm facial expression.

Koch’s complicated personality is clearly presented through a few well-written subplots. In this dialogue-heavy movie, actor Lars Eidinger, who plays Koch, artfully uses his tone and facial expressions to show some moments of kindness in contrast to his brutal Nazi side.

“Persian Lessons” also depicts a microcosm of the inner workings of a Nazi camp, such as the Nazi officers’ cheerful picnic, their gossips and office grievances, to show their ignorance of the evil they do to the Jews.

Director Perelman deftly mixes suspense into the movie and the ending is tearjerking, which makes the movie acquire great depth and lets you ignore some flaws in the plot.

The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.