Review of the movie Lessons of Tolerance

For Ukrainian cinema, which is young or even adolescent and is currently growing and developing, many genres and themes are being presented for the first time: for example, the first Ukrainian western (or rather, eastern), the first Ukrainian noir, the first Ukrainian sex comedy, the first Ukrainian Christmas comedy… Now it’s time for the first Ukrainian LGBT comedy (or, more tolerantly, LGBTIQ+ comedy).

The colorful Ukrainian comedian Arkadiy Nepytalyuk, known for his short film Blood Sausage and his feature debut The Strayed, a singer of funny and sometimes tragic provincial expression, this time presented a chamber story called Lessons in Tolerance based on the play Gay Parade by Igor Bilyts. The whole plot unfolds within the four walls of one apartment where a typical Naiduk family lives, so ordinary and average for our regions, who travel by bus and trolley, speak surzhyk and swear words, live on a modest salary, cook borsch in a large vat and drink vodka on holidays or “on occasion.”

One day, a mother-teacher (another bright character performance by Olena Uzliuk, who played Lyudka in The Strayed), who earns money for the whole family by herself and who stays in the kitchen all evening after work making dumplings (and dreams of a spa, massage, spa, cocktails, shopping), almost packs her suitcase to leave home. And then her husband (Oleksandr Yarema) and children agree to her “extreme proposal”: to take part in the state program for European integration and to take in a “real” homosexual for three weeks, for which, if successful (i.e., if they achieve mutual understanding and communicative harmony), they will be “rewarded” with a monetary reward.

It is quite obvious that our community really needs lessons in tolerance. As soon as Nepytalyuk’s film was released, the ” dabrazhelateli ” managed to paint a poster on the wall of one of the capital’s cinemas with homophobic inscriptions. These are probably the same “artists” who regularly organize some kind of angry action against the Sunshine Bunny Film Festival.

It would have been better if they, those unfortunate activists, had waited for the premiere and gone to see the movie. They would have seen themselves in the mirror and maybe made some kind of cultural reassessment. First of all, this film speaks in the simplest and most accessible “vernacular” language (literally and figuratively), without resorting to any complicated deep messages; so that both the witticisms and their open and transparent subtext are clear to every “harvester” in every remote village.

In a language that speaks with their vocabulary and style, such as the joke that a gay plumber “takes shit both at work and outside of work.” This mirror shows young gopniks who have authority “in the neighborhood,” but it is likely that their aggression hides a mental crisis caused by the discrepancy between their sexual identity and sexual orientation; and mustachioed uncles like Grisha’s godfather who always speak very loudly and with a tobacco rasp and never take off their vest (sailor’s shirt); and the quiet and “doubting” ones like Zenyk (Yarema’s character, the father of the family), who are supposedly for the patriarchy and the old regime, but do not tear their shirt off and are ready to change, reconfigure, and evolve if pushed.

It is important that Lessons of Tolerance is not only about LGBT people, but about stereotypes in general, which prevent us from understanding and perceiving each other impartially. And there are a lot of such examples in the movie: from a daughter who dreams of becoming an actress but suffers from the imposed stereotype that actresses should be beautiful; and a mother who has spent her whole life in captivity to the stereotype that a woman should stand at the stove and iron everyone’s clothes; to a homosexual who, contrary to stereotypes, turns out to be modestly neatly dressed in ordinary clothes, not in leopard print and boas, and turns out to be an ordinary plumber from the housing office, not some designer or showman, or even a hairdresser and Vasya, not Arthur…, clearly proving the miraculous truth that “gays are among us.”

And by the way, Vasya simultaneously destroys two independent stereotypes: those about homosexuals and those about housing and communal services workers, because he is surprisingly cultured and polite (I myself have been guided by stereotypical thinking at least twice in this text: I have offended combine harvesters and hairdressers).

Actually, Arkadiy Nepytaliuk, as an author and director, does not separate himself from the community, does not put himself above the people. That is, he admits that he himself is not immune to biased, stereotypical attitudes. For some reason, the Naidyuk family name is very similar to his own.