Review: The improbable ‘Persian Lessons’ manages to land an emotional punch

Although the title might suggest a quaint, cross-cultural excursion along the lines of “Italian for Beginners” or “Learning to Drive,” Vadim Perelman’s “Persian Lessons” turns out to be reaching for substantially greater gravitas. Set during the Holocaust, this inescapably oddball portrait of a transit camp supervisor who’s led to believe he’s being taught Farsi from a Persian prisoner who’s actually Belgian Jewish, relies heavily on a pair of strong performances that help to distract from lingering plot improbabilities.

The year is 1942, and among those herded into a transport heading to Germany from Nazi-occupied France, is Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) a rabbi’s son from Antwerp who is persuaded by a hungry passenger to trade his sandwich for an old book that belonged to his landlord. Written in Persian, the book will prove to be a literal lifesaver for Gilles, who manages to stave off certain execution by claiming to be not a Jew but a Persian named Reza Joon — the name that had been inscribed in its pages by Joon’s father.

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As it just so happens, the transit camp’s commanding officer, Koch (Lars Eidinger) has put out the word out that he’s looking for someone to teach him Farsi, and while he’s initially dubious about the new arrival’s claims he nevertheless proceeds to enlist his services. It’s a precarious ruse at best, but even though his Farsi’s a farce, Reza industriously manages to invent enough gibberish to teach Koch several new words a day over the course of his internment, somehow avoiding tripping up — with one, near-tragic exception.

During those lessons, Koch gradually forms something of a fatherly bond with his captive, revealing his dreams of moving to Tehran after the war and opening up his own restaurant, while Reza takes advantage of his trust to help out his fellow prisoners.

Purportedly taking inspiration from accounts shared over the years, particularly the 1997 short story “Erfindung einer Sprache” (“Invention of a Language”) by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, the script, originally penned in Russian by Ilya Zofin, struggles to overcome fundamental credibility issues. Problematic too is the decision to include plotlines involving the film’s less-compelling secondary characters, adding unnecessary weight to an already prolonged running time.

That it ultimately manages to work as effectively as it does is a credit to the firm, focused visual grip of director Perelman, best known for his Oscar-nominated 2003 drama, “House of Sand and Fog,” and, especially the impressively-rooted portrayals of the two leads.

The slight Argentine actor Biscayart, who won a French César for playing an AIDS activist in 2017’s “BPM (Beats per Minute)”, conveys the haunted guilt of a man eking out an existence on borrowed time, in the process bringing out a shred of compassion in Eidinger’s duped Koch. Despite the obstacles, they succeed in bringing the film to an emotionally resonant conclusion, providing an unwavering through line in a survival story that can’t help but feel like something may have been lost in translation.