PAUL MÁTIS, ANNA MESZÖLY in LESSON LEARNED

BALINT SZIMLER: LESSON LEARNED/FEKETE PONT (2024) NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2025

TRAILER

Life at school

This is a docudrama, very much an ensemble piece, about life in a school, focusing on a couple of teachers and a new student in fifth grade. The film is most remarkable simply for its strong, specific focus on the classroom and the daily atmosphere of a school, though some critics have said it is not as authentic as it thinks: for one thing, different scenes were shot at different schools. There are episodes of a rebellious boy, a sensitive new teacher, and the case of a large broken window that just fell out and proves hard to replace.

Lesson Learned is only the English title of this film (the Hungarian one means "Black Point"). Indeed it is difficult to see what "lesson" is "learned" in this film. The director has said simply "We wanted to capture the essence of being a child." Some Hungarians commenting on the film and some summaries read more into it, suggesting the film is a critique - which they utterly reject, or strongly endorse - of an outmoded school system; of the Hungarian school system in general. Many elementary school systems lag behind the times but it's hard to see anything uniquely Hungarian here, or any devastating picture of a school system.

If there is any theme here, it's that rebels and outliers, whether teachers or students, don't fare very well in a mainstream elementary school. This is a universal message. Perhaps the fresh life Balint Szimler has captured will survive and satisfy, in its small way, generations of future viewers.

In an interview, the filmmaker, who is 37, explains that like Palkó (Paul Mátis) in the film, he came back with his Hungarian parents to Hungary at 9 or 10 (Pálko is in time to enter fifth grade, I believe); only Pálko comes from Berlin, and the director had been living in the US, and "always felt like an outsider" (in Hungary, presumably). So that is the situation of Palkó, but it's hard to tell if he's a winner or a loser early in the film. He is good looking, calm, and confident. He breaks rules unintentionally. Later he seems to be a rebel. And finally a symbolic outsider.

The director used improvisation, with mostly non actors and no set script, using real students and real teachers, and then of course editing to bring out an effect or a meaning desired: for instance, he says scenes where Palkó talked more were cut to create the effect of his being almost always silent. He says he "always wanted to shoot a film with children and go back to the sensation of being a child – how free, intense and playful, but also sometimes horrifying, it was." There are moments, especially of the teachers in their faculty room but of students in the classroom too, that are terrific ensemble acting - and directing.

Juci (Anna Mészöly), the rather beautiful young literature teacher, is also a new arrival at the school. With her gentle manner she nonethelsss does radical things from the start, encouraging her class to express their hates, stand up and scream, and sit on the floor, where she, sitting there too, reads them a poem that seems to convert them to her and to poetry - the most subtle and touching moment in the film. It is a prizewinning performance.

Later, as can happen, a teacher takes a strong dislike to a rebelious student, and it's the PE guy Akos (Akos 'Dadan' Kovács). Palkó rebels in his class and won't play ball. Akos orders him to gather up the balls afterward, he won't, and Akos manhandles him trying to get him to run torturous chicken-jump laps around the gym. Juci sees this, knows Akos has crossed a line, and wants to report him. She has already suffered harsh criticism in private from the father of one of her students for the "crime" of teaching a poem that wasn't in the textbook. This parent becomes an agent of the kind of repression I myself once experienced from the nuns who ran a small Catholic college. If you are a teacher, you will be reported on and criticized from many directions.

Before this, one of the most experienced teachers, Kornél ((Gábor Ferenczi), is suddenly, summarily fired by authorities for an unspecified violatioh and told to vacate at once. Colleagues, who sypathize but do nothing to stick up for him, assume this is because he is connected to an NGO. This is bureaucratic, administrative, or governmental repression, something Americans have seen then and now. All part of the picture of the school Szimler is sketching, but the film isn't about this.

Or is it? A Hungarian website Valasz online, says, "Black Dot confronts our inaction, the gesture that for decades millions of people have made to defy the powers above us - be it a teacher, a boss, a school district director, a minister or an entire regime." The writer, Sashegyi Zsófia, notes the film avoids identifying with any specific period - there are no cell phones - it's obvious from what she says that Hungarians feel this film intensely and personally. There are a number of other lengthy revirews in Hunrarian online.

The festival blurb notes that Szimler's film, "just his second feature," has "all the intricacy and pleasure of a campus novel," ranging from "the shame-tinged tedium of detention lessons" (seen, like most of the moments, primarily through Palkó and Anna), to "a dazzling school-play sequence" (of Cervantes' tragedy The Fall of Numantia), whose central theme is the need to resist.

It is perhaps not a fault that the film overall is a bit enigmatic, both the young teacher and the beleaguered new student, both of whom from the look of them ought to be winners, but they are silent, tabulæ rasæ, and we can read our feelings and childhood (or teaching) memories into them. The film's weakness as a conventional film may be a strength. It hasn't quite the distinctive shape or compelling trajectory it could have had (that relates partly to being improvised, not written), but this makes it better able to capture, with its vivid 16mm look, the lightening in a bottle of everyday school life and what it feels to be a new kid or a new prof in a traditional, conventional, controlling, and student-unfriendly system where an older teacher, typically cynical, advises Anna it's always the kids' fault, whatever happens, not hers.

What about that window? What about that school trip? These are threads deliberately left dangling in this memorable and original film.

Szimler's Emmy-winning cinematographer Marcell Rév, who now works in Hollywood, is a longtime collaborator. He has done TV series, a short that got him to Cannes, and a music documentary. This should bring him international recognition.

Lesson Learned/Fakete pont, , 119 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 9, 2024, winning the Best Performance prize (for Anna Meszöly) and Special Mention in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:

Thursday, April 10
6:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater

Friday, April 11
5:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.