We’re 18 months into a global pandemic that will forever be remembered for its lockdowns and attempts at socially distant connection. As movie theaters open back up, diverting spectacles like F9 and Shang-Chi are putting actual butts back into reclining seats. The last thing anyone seemingly wants to experience, in a darkened room filled with flesh-and-blood strangers, is a feature film presented almost entirely through video calls. Paying to attend yet another Zoom meeting in 2021 feels like a nightmare scenario cooked up by those low-budget tricksters at Blumhouse.
Here comes Language Lessons, a lovely little formal exercise directed by and starring Natalie Morales, which succeeds despite its PTSD-inducing premise. Basically, it’s an extended dialogue somewhat in the vein of My Dinner with Andre and Richard Linklater’s Before tryptic. The central conceit is that our interlocutors, Adam (Mark Duplass) and Cariño (Morales), are separated by nearly four thousand miles and are, for the most part, never in the same frame but chatting via webcams. He’s a gay man living in a fabulous Big Little Lies-style mansion in Oakland. She’s a language instructor of more modest means working in Costa Rica. They’re, at first, connected thanks to Adam’s husband Will, who buys him 100 lessons with Cariño (for the low, low price of $1,000) to further improve an already competent command of the Spanish language.
When Will dies in a tragic jogging accident, early on between the first two lessons, the nature of Adam and Cariño’s relationship pivots and begins to deepen. She continues to frame their encounters as something like strict pedagogy, although the wall between the personal and professional is chipped away, little by little, from both sides. A connection is established, however shaky at first. Morales and Duplass soon trade daily updates with the instant chemistry of a longtime friendship.
There are twists and turns involving subjects like domestic abuse and even a cancer scare. But Language Lessons is fundamentally a mundane, sorry-I-missed-your-call conversation that deepens into an overarching exchange about grief and mortality. It ultimately becomes a waltz between two characters, testing the limits of their burgeoning platonic love and mutual emptiness. One of them asks: “If two people really need each other and lean on each other, is that such a horrible thing?”
I won’t spoil the other’s answer, which you can probably guess. The film’s final sequence notably breaks its format of two people, staring directly into a camera and unloading emotion. In a sense, Language Lessons most recalls the latest iteration of HBO’s excellent psychodrama In Treatment, which similarly dramatized a Venmo-esque tête-à-tête. The latter had the opportunity to plumb its characters’ motivations. The former is more interested in plot bombshells. Both are continuations of tradition that began in Ancient Greece with Socrates. Like a classic dialogue, Language Lessons bridges emotional chasms with ease.
Photo courtesy of Jeremy Mackie/Shout! Studios
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