‘Persian Lessons’ Opens Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival

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This year’s Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival runs Oct. 23-Nov. 6, in person at the Marcus North Shore Cinema (11700 N. Port Washington Road) or screening on Eventive. The festival includes five films that will screen at the North Shore and stream on Eventive— Persian Lessons, More than I Deserve, Neighbors, Plan A, Love and Mazel Tov—plus two more available on Eventive only— Lost Transport and iMordecai.

In the opening night’s film, Persian Lessons, two dozen Jews are packed into the back of a truck bumping down a forest road in 1942. Two of the captives speak to each other. One has a sandwich and the other a book of Persian stories. The man with the book offers to trade it for the sandwich—a seemingly one-sided swap given the situation. However, even though he is “not really observant,” the rabbi’s son hands him the food and takes the book.

When the truck stops in a clearing, the SS guards shout and push and line them up to be machinegunned. The boy with the book, Gilles, last to be shot, thinks quickly. “I’m not a Jew! I’m Persian!” he shouts. The guards are doubtful but remember that their commander, Koch, was “looking for Persians.” Turns out Koch wants to learn Farsi and orders Gilles to teach him. But the SS officer is wary as Gilles invents and masters a make-believe vocabulary in place of a language he doesn’t know.

Director Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons is tightly wound, tense with the expectation that Gilles, bright as he is, will falter as his charade continues. The film’s palette centers on the gray-green color of uniforms, bare forest trees in winter, moral twilight. What’s most disconcerting in this Holocaust drama are the SS troops, engaged in the chit-chat and behavior of any ordinary workplace but capable of erupting into savage cruelty against people they deem as nonhuman.

The festival closes on a lighter note with Love and Mazel Tov by director Wolfgang Mumberger, a romantic comedy rooted in German guilt. Anne runs a bookshop specializing in Judaica. She’s not a Jew but a philosemite working through her family’s vague complicity with the Third Reich and acting out against her parents. “Jews are special,” she insists, citing the tribe’s large number of Nobel winners. Love and Mazel Tov becomes a comedy of false identity when she falls for a German physician thinking he’s a Jew—actually his colleague is Jewish and must counsel him on how to respond when she asks that awful question about his family during the Holocaust: “I can’t talk about it” is a safe answer (and not a bald-faced lie!).