16/03/2021 - Pavel Vesnakov’s feature debut is a moody journey through Sofia’s shabby neighbourhoods and an exploration of a man’s wanderings through his midlife crisis

“Whatever I do turns out to be a mistake,” moans the protagonist of Pavel Vesnakov’s German Lessons [+see also:
trailer
interview: Pavel G Vesnakov
film profile], Nikola (Julian Vergov), an angry man in his fifties who is about to emigrate to Germany only a day after the end of his probation sentence, which he was given for beating up the new husband of his ex-wife (Stefka Yanorova). His hot temper seems to have doomed him to a string of successive failures, and the ship for achieving something in life has definitely sailed. Except the emigration one. Germany – a symbol of order and a stereotypical utopian destination for many Eastern Europeans – embodies a desire for a more regulated life.

However, even the emigration idea isn’t his, but rather belongs to his young girlfriend (Elena Telbis). Sensitive and emotional despite his fierce appearance, Nikola is already nostalgic about the familiar world he is about to leave behind, and hesitant regarding the future outcome of his planned endeavour. He is spending his last few hours before departure immersed in frenetic attempts to tidy up his affairs, reconcile with his loved ones and possibly make up for some missed chances. Driving around dirty and dilapidated Sofia, his sole company is the repetitive background sound of recorded German lessons for beginners, his father’s dead dog in the boot of his car and a freshly ironed white shirt on the back of the passenger seat. It’s a very special white shirt, which he puts on to steel himself for telling white lies to his suspicious parents (Vasil Banov, Meglena Karalambova) and which helps him to quell their anxiety about his upcoming failures, as well as assuage his own nervousness, guilt and shame.

German Lessons, which has just screened at the Sofia International Film Festival, is a poetic, multilayered film with melancholic and contemplative yet skilfully edited sequences, and a complex narrative that is, however, smoothly delivered, and touches upon universal existential and locally topical issues. For international audiences, it is the absorbing personal story of a middle-aged man desperately chasing one more chance in life. The rich and controversial emotional palette of the main character is masterfully relayed on screen by Julian Vergov (who won the Best Actor Award at Cairo), an actor who usually plays self-assertive and glamorous men, both in cinema and on stage. Here, he has a scruffy, criminal-like look in line with his protagonist's low self-esteem and obscure past, which is probably full of petty swindles, alcoholic binges and plenty of wasted time. For Eastern European pundits, the socio-political angle is a subtle portrait of a particular epoch and its values. Thirty years after the fall of communism, 50-year-old Nikola represents a generation that was educated in a system which collapsed before the promised bright future arrived, so he was forced to build a new life in another. He is one of those people who never managed to adapt but who is still longing for his Arcadia, somewhere out there. In this sense, German Lessons provides a group picture of a common feeling enveloping a Bulgaria of failure and despair, but also a Bulgaria with a vague, escapist hope that prosperity is only possible abroad, in the so-called “normal” world. Hence why Nikola is a character easy to identify with locally.

Pavel Vesnakov, recognised internationally for conveying bold messages in his short films, has already demonstrated his aesthetic affinity for characters situated on the fringes of society, amidst a gloomy environment, and deprived of the opportunity to make any useful move on the chessboard of their lives. His long-gestating feature debut is the mature sum of all of his previous artistic, thematic and cinematic searches, but also an advanced, intuitive study of a perplexed society in decay.

Orlin Ruevski's intimately observational camera chooses either voyeuristic viewpoints through semi-open windows or from the back seat of a car, while sneaking around the protagonist, or zooms directly into his unsettling facial expressions on the verge of an emotional outburst. The grey-sky exteriors in combination with the anonymous, decaying suburban cityscapes suggest a dead-end existential situation.

German Lessons was produced by Bulgarian company Moviemento, and was co-produced by German firm Heimathafen Film and the UK’s Jaegerfilm.