Film Review - Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher's Lounge)
Ìlker Çatak's claustrophobic drama about a stealing epidemic in a German school is agreeably stressful, despite an unsatisfying ending
The Teacher’s Lounge has been on my radar for some time. Since it has finally been granted a UK cinema release, I caught up with this gripping, knotty, thought-provoking drama last night. The film comes slightly unstuck in the determined ambiguity of the finale, but otherwise arrests the attention throughout, especially with Leonie Benesch’s outstanding lead performance.
The plot concerns a theft epidemic in a German secondary school. Young, liberal-minded Carla Nowak (Benesch), a maths and PE teacher who feels slightly like an outsider due to her Polish background, isn’t happy with the authoritarian ways in which students are being suspected, interrogated, and asked to give names, with one incident looking suspiciously like racism. But events take an unexpected turn when Carla captures surveillance footage, via her laptop, of what appears to be the perpetrator; a member of staff stealing money from her wallet.
It looks like conclusive proof. But is it? The individual in question protests their innocence, and questions are raised about the legality of Carla having placed the teacher’s lounge under surveillance. What’s more, the staff member in question has a son in Carla’s class, who begins a campaign to undermine her, insisting she apologise, and that his parent be reinstated. Carla comes increasingly under fire from staff, parents, and students, and things generally go south in a suitably tense and dramatic style.
Director Ìlker Çatak and cinematographer Judith Kaufmann shoot in the increasingly trendy 1:33 boxlike Academy aspect ratio, making the film an agreeably claustrophobic and stressful experience. Benesch’s performance is credibly strained, and one senses her character may have a panic attack at any moment. One visual flourish, involving a hallucinatory sequence in which everyone in the school suddenly appears to be wearing the same item of clothing worn by the perpetrator in the surveillance footage, is particularly striking.
As for the issues raised by the film, early on the principal (Anne-Kathrin Gummich) uses the notoriously foolish “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear” justification. Never a good sign. Thus, the school becomes a society-in-microcosm setting for debates around authoritarianism, censorship, individual rights, coercion, prejudice, and even the responsibilities of the media. It’s fascinating and thought-provoking, until the ending, which, frankly, is a bit of a cop-out.
Ambiguity is sometimes essential to the narrative. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023) is a good recent example. Here, however, I got the distinct impression that Çatak and screenwriter Johannes Duncker tried to play the ambiguity card to cover up that they weren’t sure how to end their story. That’s a shame, as this is otherwise a first-rate piece of work, which I’d still wholeheartedly recommend, with that caveat in mind.
(Originally published at Medium.)
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It sounds like a 21st century German version of "Blackboard Jungle".