As television and movies will tell you, switching schools can be hard on a kid. There are mixed studies on the developmental effect of school transitioning, let alone the personal experiences that will vary from Inside Out (good!), The Karate Kid (bad but then good), and The New Guy (I guess good but feels bad). It so happens that my experience aligns with Palkó’s (first-time actor Paul Mátis), a 10-year-old who relocates from Berlin to a small Hungarian school in Bálint Szimler’s Lesson Learned in that it sucks.

From a glance at the trimmed perimeters and clean corridors, the school implies a serene, if not old-fashioned, environment. But the inner workings reveal financial troubles, which include teacher shortages and an amusing non-sequitur about an employee trying to replace a large broken window on a top floor (a clear occupational hazard). But as a young boy faced with the burden of making new friends and fitting in, the school’s outdated state is not Palkó’s cross to bear right now. He starts off on the wrong foot when he sits down during the outdoor announcements, worn down from the direct sun. Teachers and classmates pin him as a troublemaker, which paints the rest of his actions at school.

Also new to the school is Juci (Anna Mészöly), a teacher who finds herself in constant concern over the teachers’ instilled lackadaisical attitudes toward not-so-lackadaisical issues. Juci and Palkó will meet at different points in the movie; although Juci serves as the educational elder counterpart, it’s clear that they are both hitting a wall here that can’t and won’t be moved.

And why would it? Trying to change a system staffed with people who have seen more children than I probably ever will in my life (let alone be in charge of their intellectual and physical well-being) is more of a damned effort than breaking a generational family tradition. Still, Szimler gives a valiant (and often quirky) effort of showing how the turning gears of a school smoothly operate in some areas and balks in other areas. There isn’t a specific time sequence to indicate that the days fly by; instead, the scenes feel like close-up peeks of a tableau. Little boys scheme on cutting the lunch line, teachers engrave their daily crossword scribbles into wooden tables, and parent-teacher conferences get heated when one parent refuses to accept money to send her child on an overnight field trip. 

Just like the school’s exterior, the film avoids depicting the school as an outlier. It also avoids giving in to emotional swells or feeling like we’re sliding on a downward spiral. The school just feels like a school, and, unfortunately, the unfairness (I think of the teacher that gets fired for his involvement with a NGO but children are able to perform a very melodramatic biblical play about Roman soldiers and the “yoke of slavery”) can be found on any school grounds in the world. Lesson Learned honors the joviality of childhood and harmless mischief, quaintly protected by cinematographer Marcell Rév’s framing of the bright outdoors illuminating the rather dim interiors of the classroom. Joy and laughter can still exist within an archaic system that doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s refreshing to see that bad-faith behavior doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

While a climactic conflict occurs sometime close to the middle of the film, it doesn’t feel like we’re waiting for the moment. Lesson Learned is detailed in its landscape, filled with nonprofessional children and equally-confused adults navigating classroom games and playground etiquette. It would have been easy to amount Palkó’s problems to being just a kid, but Juci’s role helps spread their hardships across the age range. The ending of the film reveals a bittersweet truth: things will change. Sometimes it’s reactive, sometimes it’s unnecessary, but change indicates that lessons were indeed learned.

Lesson Learned (Fekete pont)
2024
dir. Bálint Szimler
119 min.

Screens Saturday, 5/17, 4:30pm @ Somerville Theatre
Live Q&A with director Bálint Szimler to follow!