(courtesy IMP Awards)
At first glance, you may not think there’s a great deal of emotional depth to The Penguin Lessons.
This is not even remotely a criticism of the film adapted from the memoir of the same name by Tom Michell; it’s simply to say that the trailer suggests a whimsical film where man meets a Magellanic penguin while teaching at a prestigious private school in Argentina in the 1970s, man bonds with said very cute “pingüino” and man uses the adorability of his new friend to revolutionise the lives of his students.
It sounds like a perfectly lovely narrative for a film, and one that will warm hearts, inspire minds and life a little off the existential load off the souls of anyone who watches it.
But as The Penguin Lessons begins, in fact almost in the first scene, it becomes apparent that this is a film determined to inject some real darkness into its tale of a man whose discovery of a penguin coated in oil slick revenue and close to death on a beach in Uruguay completely upends and changes his life.
In some ways, the objective of adding some hard-hitting depth to the almost inevitable whimsicality is almost done for the adaptor of the memoir, Jeff Pope; the film is set in 1976 at a time when the economy of Argentina is collapsing, anti-fascist rebels are increasingly active and the country is very close to a military coup d’état which deposed the democratically elected president, Isabel Perón.
In the wake of the coup, which sees St. George’s College, where Michell teaches English to the pampered sons of Argentina’s elite, closed for a week while things settle, the ruling junta institutes a brutal campaign of suppression of anyone they suspect of being in any way divergent from their rightwing ideals.
This terrifying program of rounding up dissidents of any stripe, which sees people routinely abducted off the streets while passersby do their best to pretend nothing is happening, an act of cowardly omission which also includes Michell at one point when Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), the granddaughter of his cleaner, Maria (Vivian El Jaber) is taken, is intended to ensure that the population as a whole is cowed, too afraid to upset what is by any estimation a very shaky status quo.
During this campaign, 30,000 people are “disappeared”, never to resurface, lending a terrifyingly oppressive backdrop to what appears at first to be a reasonably lighthearted, inspirational film.
While The Penguin Lessons doesn’t always succeed in balancing these two quite different dynamics, and at times switches between them with something approaching thematic whiplash, it mostly succeeds in explaining why these events impact Michell, who is reasonably cosseted away from the effects of the coup (though not the runaway inflation that precedes and accompanies it) in the bucolic grounds of the school.
It is because of the coup and his adoption by Juan Salvador the penguin – and make no mistake, like the “Cat Distribution System” which deposits felines onto unsuspecting or initially unwilling people with no warning, Tom is not expecting to become the secret owner of a penguin of all animals – that Michell, mired in grief of some two decades standing, begins to rejoin life and not act as one of its cynically quipping bystanders.
Yes, the boys he teaches do come alive when Juan Salvador is brought into their classes, quite against the wishes of Headmaster Buckle (Jonathan Pryce) who, naturally, eventually relents (perhaps a little too easily but that’s a minor quibble) and there is an air of Good Will Hunting/Dead Poets Society about The Penguin Lessons, but by and large this is a movie that, all appearances to the contrary is about the stultifying weight of grief and how you emerge out from under it.
It’s no easy task, of course, and for all its buoyant whimsicality, and to be fair, it’s hard not be charmed by Juan Salvador who ends up becoming a mute unofficial therapist to Buckle, Maria and the man who becomes Michell’s good friend, fellow teacher Tapio (Björn Gustafsson), The Penguin Lessons doesn’t pretend that letting loose the bonds of grief is even remotely to being a walk in the park.
It makes it clear that Michell’s detachment from his students, the school at large, and even from Maria and Sofia who, thanks to Juan Salvador, end up becoming close friends, is the result of a great loss he has experienced, one so profound his only solution was to wall himself away from feeling anything ever again.
But then a pushy, sweet Magellanic penguin refuses to be left behind in Uruguay, and after some amusing scenes where Michell smuggles him back into Argentina, the hitherto unengaged teacher finds himself giving a damn about a whole host of things that previously left him cold.
He wades into the way that the new political situation directly impacts Sofia and Maria, at great personal cost at one point, and he begins to invest his lessons with far more passion than was previously the case.
There is no great crescendo moment of inspirational triumph, where the boys leap onto desks or the cruel, dark new realities of life in Argentina bow to some sort of hackneyed happy ending and The Penguin Lessons is all the stronger for it.
While there is happiness in the final act, and some moments of joy, there’s still a sense of sadness and loss, with the film rather sagely acknowledging that while good things can happen such as Michell coming alive again, that these moments of changed fortune and outlook are not universal.
It’s that willingness to be real and emotionally honest that gives the film, which dances between the lightly whimsical and the ferociously dark with a reasonable though not unflawed alacrity, some real heft and ensures that The Penguin Lessons is not simply a fun-loving, charmingly quirky of one man and a penguin with real personality, but a universally human story of what it means to suffer great loss, to plunge into grief and then to emerge to life again in ways unexpected, unorthodox but far more meaningful than anyone might expect.