The Penguin Lessons at Arts Picturehouse. Directed by Peter Cattaneo. £14.20.

The Penguin Lessons is a self-indulgent examination of the British expat. A violent coup d’état in Argentina is reduced to landscape for the brit abroad and his redemption arc. For all my political correctness, it is a highly watchable film. It’s fun, easy, and cashes in on our desperation for comic relief. A warm filter is so strongly applied that the overall lasting impression of the film is Orange.

The film follows Tom Michell, a miserable teacher performed by Steve Coogan, who gets a job at a posh school in Argentina. Somewhere distant, there is violence and political repression. Coogan rescues a penguin, is forced to take care of it, and, you guessed it: learns to love and let go. Students baffled by the penguin start to listen in class.

You can be confident that nothing bad will happen as the film resists extremes. The children of military leaders in the class tease but do not bully. Coogan is mildly beaten. The outspoken daughter of an Argentinian maid is abducted and later freed. The teaching scenes are generic, whether it’s the pre-penguin dull lesson or the post-penguin motivating lesson. When Coogan regains passion to teach, the film becomes a parody of the unconventional arts lesson, where everyone has to lie on the floor to understand a poem.

Coogan goes from slightly slimey to slightly endearing. The star of the show is the penguin. When actors are winning Oscars for their AI-generated accents, we must applaud The Penguin Lessons for casting two real penguins, Baba and Richard, to play the film’s feathered star.

It’s an introduction to a coup I had not heard of. At the end of the film, you learn that The Penguin Lessons is based on the eponymous memoir written by the real Tom Michell who lived in Argentina during the 1970s. There’s a touch of white saviour about Coogan’s character, as the release of the young maid follows his attempts to free her. Perhaps this really happened, but it’s not mentioned in the credits with the other parts that were real. When the film ends with the historical facts – 30,000 women remain unaccounted for, you can’t help but think the film makes it all a bit light. The abducted woman returns and all is well.

As I leave the cinema, I overhear: “America is, day by day, turning into a dictatorship just like that”.

The Penguin Lessons is showing at the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge now.