Screened as part of NZIFF 2021

Language Lessons 2021

Directed by Natalie Morales Widescreen

Two strangers explore the pleasures and pitfalls of platonic friendship while bonding over online Spanish lessons in this intimate, expressive drama shot during lockdown over video-chat calls.

Nov 30

Regent 3 Cinemas

Dec 01

Regent 3 Cinemas

USA In English and Spanish with English subtitles
92 minutes DCP

Rent

Director

Cast, Screenplay

Mark Duplass
,
Natalie Morales

Producer

Mel Eslyn

Cinematography

Jeremy Mackie

Editor

Aleshka Ferrero

Music

Gaby Moreno

Festivals

Berlin
,
SXSW
,
London 2021

Awards

Audience Award (Narrative Spotlight)
,
SXSW 2021

Elsewhere

“A gentle relationship study playing out entirely through the cramped, sterile rectangles of a virtual chat app, actor-director Natalie Morales’ freshman feature Language Lessons... [is a] tender, slender story of a queer California widower (Mark Duplass) processing his grief through online Spanish classes with a Costa Rican stranger (Morales)… Language Lessons is plainly a feat of quarantine-era production, with its two-actor, two-location, two-screen setup making it pretty much a model of what can be accomplished in lockdown conditions...

As Adam [Duplass] spirals through grief in its various pained stages, he and Cariño [Morales] converse both directly and by exchanging bilingual video messages, like 21st century penpals. While he treats her alternately as a friend, therapist and impartial sounding-board – initially oblivious to what crises she may be juggling in her own life – she flip-flops over just how much of this emotional labor she’s willing to share...

Films explicitly about the formation of friendships are rare, and Morales and Duplass have fashioned rather a perceptive one, adapting the push-pull dynamics of a romantic comedy to more delicate psychological terrain.

...It’s the amiable, spontaneous rapport between the two actor-writers that... lends ballast to [the film]... Large corners of backstory remain unpainted on both sides... which seems less a failure of writing than an acknowledgement of how much life is lived... beyond the scope of the webcam.” — Guy Lodge, Variety