Ease Your COVID Anxiety with Natalie Morales’ Charming Slice of Screenlife, Language Lessons

Mark Duplass has never been more charming and down to Earth than in his Room 104 collaborator Natalie Morales’ sophomore directorial effort, Language Lessons (her Plan B hit Hulu in May), but he has to be that charming to keep up with her.
They’re an incongruous pair but well-matched regardless, she the younger, hungrier directorial talent, he an elder statesman of indie cinema’s mumblecore movement. They make a surprising amount of sense together even though their roles are somewhat reversed in the movie’s context: Morales plays Cariño, a Spanish tutor living in Costa Rica, while Duplass plays Adam, her new student tuning in from Oakland. Cariño has the authority. Granted, the film opens on her face as she fires up Zoom for their first lesson, and her initial composure melts into immediate confusion. There’s a man on the other end of the session, but for all it matters to her he’s just a disembodied voice. “I’m Will,” the voice tells her. “So, Adam is my husband. I bought him these Spanish immersion lessons.” Adam appears demanding coffee, sees Cariño staring at him from the computer, and matches her confusion with his own.
So their relationship begins, the educator attempting to teach Spanish to a pupil whose Spanish is pretty darn good. He simply wants to get “his words” back, having spent parts of his childhood in Mexico and attained fluency at one time in his life. Cariño and Adam converse and as they converse, something more like friendship emerges, especially after their second lesson, which starts with Adam prone in bed. Tragedy has struck: Will died.
Adam’s isolation and bereavement echo sensations we’re all familiar with after the last year and a half, minus the eight days in June when everything looked good, plus the rest of the summer as American life slowly started backsliding into pandemic living—abated, yes, by the proliferation of vaccines, but still too much like 2020 for comfort as COVID cases spike for fall. But Language Lessons is only a pandemic movie in the strict sense that Morales and Duplass co-wrote it, and Morales directed it, during the pandemic: There is nothing here about a virus, or infection, or hospitals overwhelmed by bodies with no room for new ones. People pass away, but by other cruel twists of fate.