Award-winning The Lesson is a gripping tale of endurance when the odds are stacked against you
Points: 9
“Why does a decent person become a criminal?” reads the effective tagline of one of the best foreign films to be released recently in Buenos Aires. Now, that’s one disturbing question which, for sure, does not have a single answer. But in The Lesson (“Urok”), the striking debut feature by Bulgarian filmmakers Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov that won the New Directors Award at San Sebastián, you’ll find a really bleak answer in the story of an ordinary woman driven to the point of despair by a crushing debt she can’t repay in due time.
And even if the film comes across as a throbbing meditation on the grim economic circumstances of post-Communist Eastern Europe, you definitely don’t need to be Bulgarian to understand its universal resonance. You just need to be a regular person in a world run by money.
Nadezhda (Margita Gosheva) is an ethically conscious provincial Bulgarian schoolteacher who discovers that one of the young students in her English class has stolen a classmate’s wallet from her backpack. Though it’s not a minor misdemeanour, she seems a bit too obsessed with finding out who the petty thief is. Then again, she’s a teacher and so she has a moral code by which she abides. However, no matter how hard she tries, the thief remains unknown.
At the same time, her home life is not in the best of shapes. She basically raises her young daughter Dea by herself, since her husband Mladen (Ivan Barnev) is a good-for-nothing drunkard whose great idea was to buy spare parts for their lousy camper with the money Nadezhda thought they were using to pay their mortgage. So now they only have three days to prevent foreclose.
Distressed, Nadezhda will attempt to collect some money owed to her for her services as a translator, but to no avail. She intends to ask for a loan from her well-off, long-estranged father, yet her disapproval of his new (and young) wife will get in the way. She will try to get the bank to give them some extra time but that’s another dead end. Of course, loan sharks enter the scene eventually — and, believe me, you don’t want to be there when that happens.
As the austere drama it is, The Lesson is shot in a naturalistic style, à la Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. You know, a hand-held camera that follows the character everywhere in suspenseful long takes, no musical score but ambient sound, no sets but locations (or so it seems), available light for the most part, a palette of cold and drab tones, and a seamless combination of professional actors and real-life townspeople.
Add to that a lot of significant exteriors, since in social realism characters are always conditioned by their surroundings — usually for the worse.
The Lesson is also a frantic film: in her quest to meet the bank’s deadline, Nadezhda runs into all sorts of obstacles, some of them because of bad luck, others due to bureaucratic technicalities, and the rest on account of her bad judgment caused by the stressing circumstances. From what you can expect: her car breaking down, an error in transferring money, and her trusting loan sharks. And everything unfolds in a climate of escalating tension and suspense typical of a masterful thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
You may say that the string of impediments this heroine has to face sometimes verges on implausibility, that you don’t get that many bad coincidences altogether.
But we all know that, every once in a while, a perfect storm wrecks your everyday life and, whether you believe it or not, it becomes very, very real.
Grozeva’s and Valchanov’s debut feature would not have the gripping film it is if it didn’t have an absorbing central performance from an actress who appears in virtually every single shot. Indomitable and unyielding, Margita Gosheva’s Nadezhda gets all the more complex and nuanced as her maddening ordeal unfolds. She doesn’t shed a single tear, but that’s not to say she’s not hurting. It’s just that she is too busy trying to survive in an indifferent world.
Production notes
The Lesson (“Urok,” Bulgaria/Greece, 2014). Written and directed by Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov. With Margita Gosheva, Ivan Barnev, Ivanka Bratoeva, Ivan Savov, Deya Todorova, Stefan Denolyubov. Cinematography: Krum Rodriguez. Editing: Petar Valchanov. Running time: 105 minutes.
@pablsuarez
