The Pencil is bleak. It features an artist that travels to a remote Russian town over 1,000 miles from Moscow to be closer to her partner who’s been wrongly imprisoned there. She becomes a teacher who believes she can make a difference, but has to confront a violent bully.
The teacher is a naive ‘Im going to make a difference’ teacher. She’s the Russian version of Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. However, unlike the two American films, her class bully is from the criminal family that runs the town. A family that has the police department, prison, school, and any other public services in their pocket. The bully is free to extort and bully both his fellow students and teachers.
Unfortunately for her, her naive beliefs that the bad kid would take to her first art lesson are misguided (she’s obviously never taught before). She doesn’t exactly try to help him either when she says he has no talent in front of the class in their first lesson. From there, her relationship with the bully spirals downhill until the naive hope she had disappears.
The Pencil is shot well. You get a real sense of setting – the isolation from everywhere else (you never see a way out), the juxtaposition of the freedom of nature with the oppressive factories spewing smoke non stop and big run down apartment blocks, and the grey colour palette which is brought to life briefly by the teacher on their art walks.
Secondly, pay attention to the pencils in the film as the film exploits them well. There’s the local factories that create them manned by the working class locals whose kids are being taught to use them to create. Using them instead of creating them gives the kids a way out of the town. It’s also a symbol of the naive teacher’s wish to offer her students a way out, which is easily snapped by the bully in the very first lesson. It’s also no coincidence that the ending features the wood logs that are used to make pencils.
The Pencil is a clever bleak film. However, the bleakness doesn’t present the best picture of Russia. It presents a society without hope that is scared of standing up to the corrupt powers in control. If you can handle hopelessness, it is worth a watch.
P.S. To all the audience members generalising Russian (and Eastern European) film as bleak, please watch more movies before making assumptions. There’s plenty of comedies out there, and plenty of bleak American films that present a bleak picture of the U.S. too.
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