A morass of cynicism, treachery, misguided actions and the calamity they beget, The Teachers’ Lounge (in theaters Dec. 25) is a film designed to dissuade anyone from wanting to teach in an elementary school. Germany’s shortlisted entry for this year’s Best International Feature Academy Award, director Ilker Çatak’s latest is a moral drama pitched at the register of a thriller, highlighted by a Marvin Miller score of plucking strings that mirror the rapid-heartrate angst of its protagonist and amplify the suspense of her plight, almost all of which plays out within the confines of its educational setting. Raising tricky questions about trust, honesty, and manipulation with mounting dread and panic, it boasts some of the nerve-wracking anxiety of Uncut Gems and the keenness of last year’s standout Playground, even if it doesn't eventually pull off its delicate tightrope act.
Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is a new sixth-grade teacher at an unidentified grammar school plagued by a series of thefts that have targeted both students and faculty members. To handle the matter, Nowak and fellow teachers Milosz Dudek (Rafael Stachowiak) and Thomas Liebenwerda (Michael Klammer) meet with the class’s student representatives, who aren’t eager to point the finger at any particular individual. Refusing to take no for an answer, in part because he himself has been recently victimized, Liebenwerda opts for coercive methods, showing the reps a list of students and asking them to nod when his pen lands on the perpetrator. Nowak doesn’t like this and her slight cough cajoles Liebenwerda into once again making clear that these adolescents are collaborating voluntarily. Still, such talk is merely that; from any vantage point, the adults have compelled these kids into informing on their compatriots and, in doing so, gotten leverage over them—making it easy to convince them to keep this chat secret.
If this is unwise at best, and inappropriate at worst, the administration’s subsequent decision to inspect male students’ wallets for excessive money is clearly an overstep. Nonetheless, it nets them a suspect in Ali (Can Rodenbostel), whose Turkish parents are none too pleased about the accusation—especially since they can explain why he’s flush with cash. In the aftermath of this uneasy get-together, Nowak lets Liebenwerda and his comrade-in-arms Vanessa König (Sarah Bauerett) know that she disapproves of this strategy, to which Liebenwerda responds that someone had to act to get to the bottom of this long-running crime spree. Nowak demonstrates her own preferred approach to bad behavior when she spots two girls sneaking out of gym to smoke and chooses to strike a deal with them: in exchange for the return of their lighter at the end of day, they agree to not leave class without permission. To Nowak, negotiation devoid of blackmail or intimidation is the key to a productive rapport.
Regardless of this minor victory, The Teachers’ Lounge has scant interest in painting Nowak as the sole paragon of virtue in a nest of vipers. For one, Nowak’s integrity borders on the self-righteous, and alienates her from colleagues who have valid concerns about what’s occurring in their workplace. For another, she has her own selfish suspicions. In the aftermath of spying a colleague pilfering change from a teacher’s lounge cookie jar (as well as a classroom incident in which she catches a student cheating), Nowak concocts her own sleuthing scheme to get to the bottom of this mystery. Without notifying anyone, including principal Böhm (Anne-Kathrin Gummich), she places her wallet in her jacket pocket, hangs the coat on her teacher’s lounge chair, and sets her laptop to record it while she’s away, hoping to catch the culprit on camera.
This plan works like a charm, with the thief’s foreground sleeve visible in the shot as they swipe some bills. It takes mere seconds for Nowak to identify the photographed shirt (emblazoned with stars) as belonging to Ms. Kuhn (Eva Löbau), who works at the school’s front desk. Despite trying to keep things between the two of them, however, Nowak’s confrontation of Kuhn goes poorly, as does an ensuing sit-down with Böhm. Before long, rumors are swirling—as are administration concerns that Nowak violated regulations by surreptitiously videotaping her coworkers. Compounding matters further, Ms. Kuhn’s son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) is in Nowak’s class. Invariably drawn into the drama, Oskar becomes upset and rebellious, throwing the institution’s entire educational dynamic into disarray and leaving Nowak—shunned and disparaged by students, parents and colleagues alike—squeezed on all sides.
Leonie Benesch in The Teachers' Lounge.
Alamode FilmBenesch’s fraught eyes and alternately relaxed and cagey comportment capture Nowak’s mixture of confidence and alarm as events begin spiraling out of control. The Teachers’ Lounge engagingly mires itself in its pressure-cooker environment, with Judith Kaufmann’s verité-esque handheld cinematography and Miller’s fretful orchestral themes amplifying its urgency. At every turn, Nowak is beset by forces that view her as a (if not the) cause of this dawning calamity, or at least an impediment to a solution, and Çatak and Johannes Duncker’s script smartly saddles her with some responsibility for her situation. Nowak is an altruist who’s trying to play by the reasonable rules, and in the case of Oskar, to support a young kid who hasn’t asked for the mess in which he finds himself. Yet her unwillingness to follow through on what she’s begun, to hold to her convictions and defend herself, to be wholly candid about her behavior, or to grasp that she can’t be equally aligned with everyone all at once, also reveals a holier-than-thou foolishness that compounds her circumstances.
It's Nowak who turns out to be the most frustrating aspect of The Teachers’ Lounge, given that this controversy is largely caused by her (and, by extension, the administration’s) reluctance to simply stand by the persuasive evidence of guilt she has in her possession, and which Ms. Kuhn, for all her bluster and legal threats, never adequately denies. Çatak wants his drama to be about chaos born from distrust, duplicity and bad-faith assumptions and conclusions, but it ultimately hinges on an allegation that, from the first moment to the last, comes across as rather incontrovertibly accurate. As a result, the film evokes both its milieu’s multifaceted powder-keg stresses and potential ethical dilemmas, albeit via a story that fails to completely figure out how to keep truth (and, thus, the correct course of action) a debatable question.
