Instructive but not didactic – and also as tense as hell – The Teachers’ Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) takes a fairly simple situation and not only escalates it but pushes it out in all directions. Good guys and bad guys are there none, or not, at least, any that we can quite get a glove on.
We’re in a German school where someone has been stealing stuff from the staff room. It’s one of the kids, is the feeling, since what adult would do such a thing? As the action opens Clara Nowak, an idealistic new teacher, is trying to prevent her class of kids from being physically searched. She’s unsuccessful and the search does take place, leading to one of her kids, Ali, being accused. His Turkish immigrant parents are called in but they don’t take it lying down, and accuse the school of racial profiling.
Not convinced it was Ali, though her fellow teachers quickly consider the case closed, Clara decides to leave the camera running on her laptop, and catches the actual thief redhanded. Or thinks she has. The recording reveals a person rummaging through her jacket but not the perp’s face. But what is quite visible is a corner of a distinctive blouse – it belongs to one of the school’s administrative staff.
Being the son of Turkish immigrants himself, director and co-writer İlker Çatak might have been expected to take the Clara-Ali-Ali’s parents-the school dynamic as his subject. But he’s more interested in hashing out the concept of “truthiness” than telling a story of absolute right and wrong or of everyday prejudice. His film is not about what actually happened. He’s more interested in what happens once things go viral, pestilential even.
What a brilliant little set-up this is, wrong-footing us (Ali) before getting to where it wants to start, and from here haring off into a concatenating hell of accusation and counter-accusation. Not only does the surely-caught-redhanded thief deny the charge vehemently, they come back with a charge of their own. Illegal surveillance. Data theft. False accusation. Breach of workplace etiquette and so on.
From here things go from bad to worse, aggravated by the fact that the accused’s son, Oskar, is one of Clara’s pupils. Evidence – the blouse is surely the smoking gun here – becomes incidental in a back and forth in which prior allegiances rather than the factual truth take precedence. The accused does not back down either. In fact they double down, then double down again.
Çatak sets up several fabulous confrontations – Clara in a parent teacher meeting that goes disastrously wrong; Clara interviewed by the cadet journalists on the school magazine; Clara losing control of her class; Clara in a grim kangaroo court in the staff room. Where, you might ask, is the school’s principal as the prevailing mood slips from orderly to feral? Staying benignly (and culpably) as far away from this unholy mess as she can.
Much is left open and not much is eventually resolved and even our sympathies for Clara are tested before Çatak brings the curtain down. In the interim, awards-demanding acting from Leonie Benesch, a dab hand at victims (see the TV show Babylon Berlin) who rises to the challenge of a lead role and carries all before her with a superb performance of a woman who is both being undermined and is undermining herself.
The acting is superb throughout, though, with special mention going to Leonard Stettnisch as young Oskar. But look at all the kids in Clara’s class, it’s all absolutely plausible.
The edgy and anxiety-inducing performances are intensified by Çatak and DP Judith Kaufmann super-bright shooting style – which reduces Benesch’s pale features to an almost cartoonlike two dots for eyes and a slit for a mouth – and Marvin Miller’s staccato and pizzicato score of strings drawn taut. As well you might be yourself. I had to pause the action several times and pace about the room.
The Teachers’ Lounge – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
