A cinematic referendum on the soul of a nation.
Addressing a packed out audience at his film’s New Directors/New Films post-screening Q&A, director Balint Szimler inquired with a wry smile whether or not the Hungarian government was aware that his film had even been made. Despite earning a coveted slot within the Locarno Film Festival’s Cineasti del Presenti competition, the cast and crew of Lesson Learned received no acknowledgement from the conservative Fidesz-led government, where nationalist, euro-sceptic ideological inclinations hold sway and politically cynical cultural diktats have emerged with concerning prominence. It’s a shameful omission, but hardly a surprise, considering the focused intensity with which the film takes aim at its subject – the sclerotic and calcified educational institutions of contemporary Hungary; and in turn, the very spirit of the nation itself.
Shot entirely in one location, the film inhabits the shoddy and claustrophobic interior of a public Hungarian primary school with a masterful confidence. Szimler’s camera is at ease within these confines, wielding tightly framed close ups and frenzied tracking shots to evoke a sense of the physically and thematically intransigent – teachers and students alike are fixtures within this diorama, players on the stage of system so entrenched in routine and instinct that the mere imagination of an alternative is hardly conceivable. This quality can only be achieved with a faithful allegiance to the real, and here Szimler shines – deploying improvisation and non-professional actors with great aplomb, and a choreography so natural that it can hardly be understood as such.
At the center of this harried amalgam are a pair of newcomers (to both the school and the silver screen), as teacher and student – the idealistic and institutional naif Juci; and the repatriated outsider Palko. As Juci earnestly eschews didactic convention for the greener pastures of expressive exploration in her classroom (much to the consternation of the school administration and parents alike), the young Palko almost inexplicably finds himself on the wrong side of his teachers and classmates. It is on his shoulders that the philosophical weight of the film lies – actor Paul Matis’ visage reflects a somber resignation to mechanisms and structures of alienation over which he has no power and of which he has no understanding. There is a quiet maelstrom of anomie and isolation at the heart of Palko’s experience, and it is almost singularly the ease with which he is cast as an outsider by peers and teachers alike that damns him to self-directed solitude and defiance.
Teachers and parents are hardly spared from these forces as well. The vagaries of an indifferent bureaucracy plague the staff at various turns, and the crushing whims of societal dysfunction cause rifts between overextended mothers and fathers. All the while, Szimler points the sharpened edge of his camera at socio-cultural orthodoxy, the petty tyrants and old guard lackeys who comprise the butt of his ire. Very little is implicit in this depiction, and nuance begins to take a back seat to the thematic driving forces that seem to arrive at the same obvious, albeit well-excavated, destination. Despite its chaotic beauty and adherence to an immersive hyper-realism, the film loses sight of itself as its own didactic brow-beating leaves little room for the assimilation of alternative understandings and realities. As such, the realism loses its sheen as something bearing the potential of pure, uncalculated expression in the revelation that it is more a carefully orchestrated concoction intent on making clear the moral of a cynical and pre-destined story.
