A British filmmaker gives Hillary her own noir.
Historians looking back on the third decade of this millennium might find Alice Troughton’s debut feature The Lesson, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, more important than it seems now. But right now, The Lesson is an appalling example of our moral decay. Its story of black British writing prodigy Liam Somers (Daryl McCormack), hired as tutor for the son of his literary idol J. M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant), plays out today’s casual deceit and treachery. Liam wins the confidence of Sinclair’s wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) and their son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan). These characters’ hidden resentments — filial, marital, sexual, literary — are presented as ironic revelations.
But Liam (a young Will Smith type with Rami Malek’s haunted, probing eyes) takes advantage of the wealthy white family’s secrets as his route to fame — as if disturbing race, sex, class, and heritage traditions amounts to an authentic social critique.
Troughton and screenwriter Alex MacKeith dramatize Liam’s worker-tutor treachery as per Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite, epitomizing everything wrong in the culture wars. As household tensions on the lavish estate are exposed through predictable sexual teasing (and intellectual games credible only to someone who doesn’t write for a living), the unwholesome behavior swells into something very much of our moment. This is the first film to approximate the intersectional trickery of the Jussie Smollett hoax — it’s Britain’s own Six Degrees of Separation. What starts as familiar bourgeois decadence becomes an exercise in Millennial alienation and an approving exhibition of mean-spirited feminism.
Liam recites Shakespeare’s Sonnets verbatim, flaunting a unique intellectual gift as genius: “Words are like triggers for me. They set off a sequence, so if I’ve read them, I remember.” Yet he betrays his own heritage. His sly ambition and antagonism meet their match in Sinclair’s snooty arrogance (Grant plays it with Gielgud intonations). Yet both men are bested by Hélène, whom Delpy portrays as the sturdy, ample-hipped bearer of life’s — and the literary world’s — riddles.
In interviews, Troughton crows about her thriller plot being a “neo-noir,” although she evidently doesn’t know the meaning of that cinema style or what distinguishes the definition of a genre. But she and MacKeith share a basic misunderstanding of immorality as a fashionable idiosyncrasy.
That’s the trendy essence of the new misanthropy now rampant throughout British and American public service and phony class dramas such as TV’s Succession. Liam’s naïveté about classical music — knowing facts but not feeling — indicts Gen Z’s shallow experience. It’s similar to the bravura classroom lesson in Tar. But Troughton also attempts small-scale bravura through Liam’s voyeuristic discovery of his bosses’ unorthodox sex life; Hélène’s recall of her eldest son’s suicide; Bertie’s revealing his father’s cruel indifference; the mechanical detachment of seeing a writer’s words roll out of a printer; and a lawn-mower robot prowling the lush Sinclair parkland — all Kubrickian signs of Millennial misanthropy.
The Lesson is only partly failed noir. Sinclair watching Diana Dors’s 1956 crime film Yield to the Night (Blonde Sinner) is Troughton’s doltish homage to female empowerment. She celebrates misandry — unmistakably inspired by the blatancy of contemporary politics. When Liam describes beating Sinclair at his own literary subterfuge (“I found the original on the server”), Hélène’s response is undisguised Hillary Clinton: “That’s why I wiped it.”
And that’s the line to make future historians gasp. It’s not coincidental, as proved when Hélène’s cover-up dismisses Liam’s part in the hoax: “It’s much better that you never existed at all. My version of events is the only version. You can see that.”
Troughton’s epilogue offers a fake-news TV announcement uncannily true to today’s regime media: “Liam Somers’s story of a fading patriarch presiding over a grief-stricken family has been hailed as one of the literary debuts of the year.” In other words, The Lesson climaxes with a dead white male author, a black victim-villain, and a triumphant white female criminal mastermind. Troughton is wrong to call this “noir.” She’s gloating about her own darkness.
