Lesson Learned

Original title: Fekete Pont

Directed by: Bálint Szimler

Country: Hungary

Length: 119 min.

Year: 2024

Premiere: Locarno Film Festival 2024

Avalilability: releases September 19 in Hungary

BEST PERFORMANCE & SPECIAL MENTION - LOCARNO 2024, "CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE"

Synopsis: fifth-grader Palkó faces the harshness of the hungarian school system. 

RATING: 4.5/5 (RECOMMENDED)

 

REVIEW

A classroom. A teacher's lounge. A courtyard with a tree. these are the settings inside a school, in the middle of a brutalist prefab district, through which Lesson Learned by Bálint Szimler presents itself - the settings where the story of Palkó takes place. A boy who returns from abroad, he is not the only newcomer: a young sobstitute teacher is also a new entry to this environment, that soon proves to be too obtuse and imposing on both.

The story of Lesson Learned starts not without a sense of humour, but soon the laughters become more and more sour. An intense sense of injustice dominates the film - its reasons being very well known, even if never directly mentioned nor explicitly referenced. As one of the opening scenes perfectly visualises with the schoolyear beginning ceremony: kids that faint after being forced to stand under the late summer heat, as the teachers and students sing a traditional patriotic song completely out of tune, Lesson Learned shows a disharmonic system, with something rotten inside. Yet, the form chosen to describe this reality is the opposite, a sort of melancholic harmony,

In a system of chekcs and balances, the film focuses on the stories of both boy and teacher, which intertwine and digress from each other, but point at the problematicies of the hungarian educative system, and by extension, to the administrative system - both topics that are very central in contemporary Hungary and have been subject of other indipendent films, namely Explanation for Everything (whose director Gábor Reisz makes a blink-and-miss cameo here) and Without Air. The strength of Lesson Learned lies exactly in its balanced approach: with the cinematographic language maintaining its dominance over the thematic importance, its social commentary is deductible by the implicit, the untold, the visual references, speaking louder than words. Szimler's debut is a film in which the cinematic language dominates, and does so outstandingly.

Repeated moments of visual poetry set the film's rhythm: with a piano leitmotif, the empty halls, the metaphors that capture the protagonists' inner feelings, Lesson Learned lets the film breathe between the emotionally draining scenes that hardly can leave indifferent. In no way the intensity is edulcorated, rather it allows more engagement, by allowing reflexive pauses to the narration, beautifully shot on 35mm by famed cinematographer Marcell Rév, whose work mimetically contributes to the poetic form of the film.

Lesson Learned is a film of utmost importance for the themes it tackles, but that is outstanding beyond its socio-political relevance: it is a film of pure cinematic bliss, outstanding beyond its subject, for its strong and balanced narrative qualities.