The Penguin Lessons: A Film, a Feeling, and the Layers We Don’t Expect
I watched The Penguin Lessons the other night and, to be honest, I was just expecting a pleasant couple of hours.
Steve Coogan, a bit of dry humour, a slightly odd story about a man and a penguin drifting around 1970s Argentina. The sort of film you watch, enjoy, and move on from.
But it didn’t quite let me do that.
It sat there afterwards, like a tune you can’t shake.
The name he gives the Penguin itself was a quiet wink. “Juan Salvador” is the Spanish title for Richard Bach’s 1970s bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull - the story of a bird who refuses the flock’s mundane life and instead chases something higher: freedom, perfection, and the courage to be different.
By naming his oil-covered penguin after that idealistic seagull, Michell was gently saying this small, stubborn creature had the same spirit.
And the more I thought about it, the more it felt like one of those layer cakes. You think you’re just getting the icing.. something light, maybe a bit quirky..but underneath there’s something denser, something you didn’t quite expect.
It was that beach scene.
The penguin covered in oil. Not played for drama. No speeches. Just a quiet decision to try and clean it.
And for some reason, that stuck.
Not because I’ve ever cleaned a penguin. Not because I’ve lived through anything like 1976 Argentina. But because it felt familiar in a way that’s hard to explain.
That’s the strange thing about films.
Every now and then, one comes along that has nothing to do with your day-to-day life… and yet somehow it does. It taps into something underneath, something about mess, or responsibility, or just the feeling that things can get out of hand without anyone quite noticing when it happened.
I found myself thinking about that time and place: the Argentine military coup of 1976, the years that followed, the Dirty War.
The country’s spill was harder to wash away.
Yet my experience with the film was felt after I had ticked the upvote and thought about what next to watch. I kept thinking about it. Not in a heavy, academic way. Just as a kind of backdrop that made the small act on the beach feel bigger.
Because while one creature is being cleaned in front of you, you can’t help but wonder about everything else that isn’t so easy to fix.
And maybe that’s why it lingered.
Not because it answered anything.
But because it didn’t.
It just showed a moment, small, stubborn, and oddly hopeful, set against something much larger and far more complicated.
And somehow, that was enough to make it feel real.
That’s probably why we connect with films like this.
Not because they mirror our lives directly, but because they echo something deeper - something we recognise without being able to quite put it into words.
A layer we didn’t expect.
And once you notice it, you can’t quite unsee it. No, the little penguin could not fly. But wow, he did soar!
So what did Juan Salvador teach us?
Leaving the flock doesn’t automatically make the sky clear. It just makes the view different, and you still have to decide what to do with it.
Because both stories - one feathered seagull, one oil-stained penguin - are really about attention. About the moment you notice something small and realise it sits inside something much larger that you didn’t fully see before.
One teaches escape from the flock. The other teaches care in the middle of the mess.
And somehow it got me thinking about Australia.
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