The Holocaust thriller Persian Lessons walks a tightrope of tension, and the ending is very emotionally powerful. Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is a Belgian Jew sent to a German concentration camp. He seeks to avoid death by claiming to be Persian named Reza. He is not anticipating that a Nazi officer will demand to be taught Farsi. That officer, Koch (Lars Eidinger), aspires to a postwar future as a Tehran restaurateur.
Gilles/Reza, who doesn’t know ANY Farsi, must invent an entire faux Farsi language, word-by-word, and remember it. All the while, he’s sweating out the likelihood that his ruse will be discovered.
The blustery Koch, with his Persian fixation, is an oddball. A chef when he opportunistically joined the Nazi Party, he’s not a True Believer, although he is very comfortable with genocide. In another time or place, he could have easily been a corrupt official or a mafioso. While Gilles/Reza is the protagonist, the story rises and falls on Koch’s whims, and Eidinger’s performance is excellent.
Nazis were bullies at their core, and some of Persian Lessons’ lighter moments are when Gilles/Reza is offscreen and the Nazis’ own foibles, with their sexual peccadilloes and their petty internal power plays, are on display. There’s an especially funny scene when Koch gets a leg up on his boss, the camp’s Commandant.
Persian Lessons was directed by Ukrainian-born Vadim Perelman (2003’s Oscar nominated House of Sand and Fog). Belarus tried to submit Persian Lessons for an Academy Award, but it was too international to qualify as a Belarus film. IMDb catalogues it as a Russian/German/Belarus film; Biscayart is Argentine, Eidinger is German, and screenwriter Ilja Zofin is Russian.
I screened Persian Lessons for its North American premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July 2021. It opens June 9 at the Laemmle Royal in LA and more widely on June 16, including San Francisco’s Opera Plaza and the Landmark Pasadena.