All too often, a Toronto Film Festival premiere is seen as an audition for a U.S. release, when the end result is more like sending a manned space flight into the sun. The Penguin Lessons is a case in point, being a peculiarly British movie that takes a very traditional trope — man becomes attached to a very unusual pet — and then infuses it with an unexpectedly modern sense of humor. Given its setting (Argentina, 1976, just as President Isabel Perón is being booted out), there were always going to be some serious issues to deal with that wouldn’t quite square with what is essentially a wry comedy. Star Steve Coogan, however, working from a script by his frequent writing partner Jeff Pope, does his best to ground the movie, using irony in a way that international audiences may find hard to process.
After an epoch-defining montage of civil unrest featuring Henry Kissinger and riot police, it begins in earnest with English teacher Tom Michell (Coogan) arriving at St. George’s College in Buenos Aires. A cleaner is painting out the graffitied words “Fascistas bastardos” from the wall, just as a bomb explodes in the distance, causing armed police to descend on him. The school’s headmaster, Buckle (Jonathan Pryce), comes to the rescue, noting that a coup is due any minute. “It’s a ghastly business. We try to keep out of it all,” he says, before outlining the school rules: “No loud music, no smoking, no pets.”
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The first meeting with his hard-of-hearing housekeeper Maria (Vivian El Jaber) doesn’t go well; in fact, she ends up walloping him with a ladle. Neither does his introduction to the Finnish physics teacher Michel (Bjorn Gustaffson), who simply turns up in his room (“Are we roommates?” asks Michell. “Do you have any vodka?”). Buckle reveals that, being a private school, the pupils tend to be very privileged and spoiled, warning Michell to stay out of the politics that even infiltrate the classroom. “Keep your views to yourself,” he says, “and don’t bore the rest of us.” But Michell has no interest in politics, just as he has no interest in any sport other than football. “I like my balls round,” he says, disgustedly, after finding out that he has also been assigned the role of assistant rugby coach.
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It is while shirking his coaching duties — napping on a bench in the school grounds — that he overhears the maid, Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), in discussion with the local fishmonger. The fishmonger is trying to recruit Sofia to his revolutionary cause, but Sofia is not interested — and much to her relief, Michell pretends not to have heard. In fact, when the military coup is announced, signaled on the radio by Sousa’s rousing march “The Liberty Bell,” all Michell thinks about is being woken up by the Monty Python theme. And when St. George’s boys are sent home for a week, he rejoices, enlisting Michel for a road trip to Uruguay, where they will “maybe meet a couple of ladies.”
They do meet a couple of ladies, and Michell chats them up with his by-now rather endearing sarcasm. “I’m like Ernest Hemingway, but with no money, and I haven’t written any books,” he tells them. Such patter goes down well, so he takes one of the women for a romantic seaside walk, which is where they encounter the penguin, covered in the residue of a massive oil spill. Michell is prepared to leave it, but the woman insists, so they take it back to his hotel. After cleaning it up, the woman reveals that she is married, leaving Michell alone with the penguin.
His first attempt to dump it fails, as does the second, so Michell is forced to smuggle it first into Argentina and then into St. George’s, with its strict no-pets policy. Newly christened Juan Salvador, the penguin becomes a clandestine hit with the pupils, who are disarmed into decorum by it. (Indeed, a very funny running joke is that everyone who meets the penguin feels compelled to confide in it, including the headmaster.) To offset this whimsy, however, the story takes a darker turn when members of the local community begin to disappear. As Michell starts to wake up to what is happening to the people in his immediate environs, he also begins to open up about the tragic turn of events that led him to the place he’s in now, both mentally and geographically: alone and far from home.
Director Peter Cattaneo has fused melancholic comedy and social issues before, notably in his surprise 1997 hit The Full Monty, but The Penguin Lessons is dealing with a far greater humanitarian tragedy than unemployment in Sheffield, and the film’s low-key score sits somewhere in the middle, which doesn’t exactly help. Older audiences, however, will certainly respect what everyone is trying to do here, especially admirers of Coogan in his more pensive guises. The penguin itself is a MacGuffin in this respect, and what lingers in the mind longer than the final Super-8 footage of the real Juan Salvador is the story of a man newly developing a conscience, something that might get lost in the wash at a big festival screening but will certainly land on a more personal one-to-one basis.
Title: The Penguin Lessons
Festival: Toronto (Gala Presentations)
Director: Peter Cattaneo
Screenwriter: Jeff Pope
Cast: Steve Coogan, Jonathan Pryce, Vivian El Jaber, Björn Gustafsson, Alfonsina Carrocio, David Herrero
Sales agents: CAA, Rocket Science
Running time: 1 hr 50 mins