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Lessons from a Penguin is an uneven portrait of 1970s Argentina as seen by a foreigner.

Lessons from a Penguin is an uneven portrait of 1970s Argentina as seen by a foreigner.

The Penguin Lessons ( Spain-United States-United Kingdom / 2024). Direction : Peter Cattaneo. Screenplay : Jeff Pope. Photography : Xavi Giménez. Music : Federico Jusid. Editing : Robin Peters. Cast : Steve Coogan, Jonathan Pryce, Björn Gustafsson, Vivian El Jaber, Agostina Carrocio, Micaela Breque, Ramiro Blas. Distributor : Diamond. Duration : 111 minutes. Rating : only suitable for ages 13 and over. Our opinion : average.

In the 1970s, Tom Michell was a young British man with a cosmopolitan spirit who, just after graduating, became interested in an advertisement in an English newspaper calling for those interested in traveling to Argentina to teach at the prestigious St. George's School in Quilmes. He arrived in our country to fulfill this role at the height of the political violence of those times, in a society plagued by terrorism and the devastation wrought by the military dictatorship.

The decision to impose that political agenda and thereby influence everything Michell shares in his memoirs was the worst possible decision. Not only because it overshadowed the most interesting aspects of the book that inspired this film, but because this shift in focus also forced unnecessary changes in the story's human and social portrait, which is both sympathetic and highly uneven. Starting with the main character.

Lessons from a Penguin Capture

The still twenty-something Michell, a foreigner bold enough to dare to rescue an oiled penguin about to die on a beach in Punta del Este and take it to Buenos Aires to save and care for it, becomes here a solitary fifty-something who tries to mitigate the pain of some very deep emotional wounds far from home.

Beyond the differences in style and period, it's inevitable to compare this adaptation with another recent film about this peculiar way of making friends. In My Friend the Penguin , by Brazilian director David Schurmann, the bond between a disillusioned fisherman and the little animal (also based on a real-life story) led us into a transparent and spontaneous emotional world .

Here, however, a much more mature and disillusioned version of the real Michell, played strangely reluctantly by Steve Coogan, tells everyone that he returned to Buenos Aires with the penguin after having failed in his attempt to have sex with a woman during a brief getaway to the Uruguayan coast.

Lessons from a Penguin Capture

This isn't the only liberties director Peter Cattaneo ( The Full Monty ) takes with the original story. He invents a key character, a young school employee who is fiercely opposed to the de facto government but also rejects the use of weapons by insurgent groups, and ends up kidnapped by a paramilitary group.

Faced with this fact and everything else, the English professor seemingly goes from complete detachment to active engagement with everything happening around him. We say seemingly because Coogan's facial rigidity never changes, and from that impassiveness, it's hard to believe that his outlook on things has completely changed thanks to the proximity of his new feathered friend.

Cattaneo attempts to show this improbable inner transformation by incorporating a more childish variation on the plot of Dead Poets Society : the students at the elite school who just yesterday were making fun of the new English teacher and throwing paper airplanes in the middle of literature classes are now consummate poetry lovers who listen to inspiring classical texts while lying on the classroom floor.

Lessons from a Penguin Capture

Catalan cinematography by Xavi Giménez fills the images of a fictional Buenos Aires with nostalgic golden tones, filmed on location in the Canary Islands and depicting its everyday life with excessive picturesqueness, making it hardly credible. It's also curious, playing the role of a fastidious school principal, to see Jonathan Pryce, who, after Evita and The Two Popes, is once again participating in an English-language film with an Argentine theme.

According to
The Trust Project
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