12 A lesson in self-immolation
Mariya Ivancheva, University College Dublin
Christina Grozeva and Peter Valchanov’s The Lesson (2014) is probably the first feature film that explains the Bulgarian winter of discontent in 2013. It tells the story of a ‘normal’ week in the life Nadezhda (Margarita Gosheva), a Bulgarian school teacher from a small town. While she tries to punish one of her students who committed theft in a morally instructive way, life teaches the instructor a much more serious moral lesson. The Lesson is based on a true story from 2010, sensationally publicized in the Bulgarian media as ‘A teacher robbed a bank with a toy gun‘. This title attracted the attention of the two directors. The film is interesting not only because of its unusual and curious story, but precisely because it is told through the many painful truths in the everyday life of an ‘ordinary’ Bulgarian.
At the first glance, the movie is fun. Viewers laugh heartily at the teacher’s masterfully portrayed clumsiness, at the infantile comments and reactions of the adult characters in the movie, at the moments when human strength, weakness, and ingenuity backfire or lubricate stalled mechanisms of everyday life. Yet, the smiles gradually freeze and so does the heart. With a stunning simplicity, typical of directors such as Michael Haneke, Grozeva and Valchanov lead Nadezhda through all the cycles of a modern hell. Unemployment and precarity, uncertainty and exploitation, physical threats and sexual coercion all feature in Nadezhda’s story as she tries to pay back the last installments of her family’s mortgage.
The Lesson reveals a long-held public secret: most of the physical and emotional labor in the world today falls on the backs of women. Beyond the work women perform in their workplace, they are the ones who not only take care of the family’s survival and well-being, but also predominantly manage the household economy and debt. The film also reveals the difficulties and the conflicts which women face in an advanced capitalist society: the need to confront not only gender inequalities but also the crumbling of all networks of institutional and interpersonal solidarity and support. The story of the Bulgarian teacher shows what happens when all forms of human dignity and mutual aid are allotted monetary value and expected to perform according to market rules. It reminds us that despite the promise of 1989 the post-socialist world was not liberated from relentless bureaucracy – that it lives on and lives well, ever more soulless and impersonal, especially in these times of new technologies. The Lesson does not shy away from the painful topic of corruption: the normalized impunity of informal cooperation between the agents of law enforcement, financial capital and the criminal world. Without becoming sensationalist, the film shows the subtle yet brutal mechanisms of physical, sexual, and emotional coercion in a financially and emotionally impoverished society.
Nadezhda is