Film review

Das Lehrerzimmer

İlker Çatak (2023)

Each scene of The Teachers’ Lounge is individually absorbing.  The longer the film goes on, though, the less sense the narrative makes as credible, realistic drama.  Perhaps the German-Turkish director İlker Çatak, who wrote the screenplay with Johannes Duncker, isn’t aiming for realism.  But it’s what he leads you to expect from the naturalistic visuals and acting – and if the screenplay’s accumulating implausibility is designed to make a point, it’s hard to see what that is.  The Teachers’ Lounge is compelling but exasperating.

The story is set in a present-day German secondary school, where a ‘zero tolerance’ policy operates; as Bettina Böhm (Anne-Kathrin Gummich), the school principal, explains to a twelve-year-old pupil’s parents, ‘We look into every matter, no matter how small’.  The matter that has led Dr Böhm to summon these parents to a meeting in her office hardly seems small.  Thefts of money from the staffroom[1] have been taking place; two teachers, Milosz Dudek (Rafael Stachowiak) and Thomas Liebenwerda (Michael Klammer), have searched the wallets of boys in a seventh-grade class and discovered a large amount of cash in the possession of Ali (Can Rodenbostel).  His Turkish immigrant parents (Ugyar Tamer and Özgür Karadeniz) indignantly inform Dr Böhm and Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), in attendance as Ali’s form teacher, that they gave their son the cash in order for him to buy something on the way home from school.  In an earlier scene, Carla also sits in on Milosz’s and Thomas’s grilling of Jenny (Antonia Luise Krämer) and Tom (Vincent Stachowiak), her form’s two representatives on the school council; while Thomas in particular urges the pair to name names, Carla reminds Jenny and Tom of their right to remain silent.  The interview with Ali and his parents compounds Carla’s unease about the pressure her students are being put under.  After witnessing a teaching colleague help themselves to money from the staff piggy bank, Carla takes matters into her own hands.  She puts some notes in an inside pocket of her jacket, which she leaves on a chair in the staffroom, and uses her laptop’s recording facility as a secret surveillance camera while she’s out of the room.  When she returns, some of the money has disappeared and Carla has visual evidence of how it disappeared.

The laptop camera shows an arm – in a white blouse with yellow stars – looming up to Carla’s jacket and, a moment later, moving quickly away from it.  The school’s competent and popular administrator, Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau), is wearing a blouse of the same design and Carla confronts her immediately, telling Friederike that, if she’ll just own up and return the money, the matter won’t go any further.  Friederike furiously denies the accusation.  Carla reports the matter to Dr Böhm.  The principal shows Friederike the evidence and warns the police will need to be involved.  Friederike continues to deny the theft and storms out.  The laptop recording and its immediate aftermath are in two ways pivotal in The Teachers’ Lounge:  they’re an important dramatic trigger and the point at which doubts about İlker Çatak’s storytelling start to set in.  Friederike Kuhn is the (single-parent) mother of Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), Carla’s star maths pupil.  You can see why Carla might therefore be particularly shocked by the evidence of the recording and unsure what to do next – maybe the Oskar connection is supposed to explain why she tells Friederike she’s willing to let the matter drop, an offer presumably meant also to echo Carla’s sensitive, protective attitude towards her students who’ve been under suspicion.  But it’s not convincing that she would say nothing more provided she got her own money back from Friederike:  in deciding to make the recording, Carla felt she was acting in the interests of the teaching staff collectively.

Carla is a recent appointment to the faculty and Lore Semnik (Kathrin Wehlisch) appears to be her mentor; it’s hard to understand why, all things considered, she doesn’t go to Lore for advice.  There’s a larger problem with the plotting, though.  She may not have been teaching long but everything so far has suggested that Carla is not only good at her job but also has a clear understanding of school rules and their application.  If she knows the kids can’t be coerced into snitching on each other it’s surprising she doesn’t realise that unauthorised recording of staffroom goings-on isn’t allowed.  It’s incredible that Dr Böhm doesn’t realise this either:  it takes Milosz Dudek to point out to the principal that Carla is liable to disciplinary action or worse.  From this point on, İlker Çatak sets up crises that simply aren’t followed up.  A chief example is Carla’s parents evening:  concerns are already being raised there about the interrogation of pupils when Friederike, suspended from her post and barred from school premises, turns up to inveigh against Carla’s conduct.  Carla rushes out to the bathroom, where she has a panic attack.  Other parents, naturally disturbed by what they hear from Friederike, threaten to take the matter further but apparently don’t – just as there’s no more mention of the police or evidence of any repercussions for Carla.

Except for one brief sequence in an area just outside the school grounds, the film’s action takes place entirely within them.  Except for a few remarks made at the parents evening, and the knowledge that Friederike and Oskar are mother and son, we learn almost nothing about the characters’ lives outside their school environment.  Çatak’s purpose in restricting the action and our information in this way is obvious enough.  The school is a multicultural society; it purports to give its ‘stakeholders’ a voice in governance; it’s also a place where racism and injustice, or perceived racism and injustice, keep rearing their ugly heads.  In other words, it’s a microcosm of the world outside in a multiracial European democracy de nos jours.  This comes across loud and clear, however, partly because the school’s systems and structures turn out to be so improbable that we can only accept them as symbolic of 2020s society more largely.  It seems the pupils in Carla’s class are the only pupils suspected of the staffroom thefts; later on, when Oskar, enraged by what’s happened to his mother, starts behaving violently, his classmates, Jenny and Tom, appear to be the only students at the school council.  This might work – a microcosm-within-a-microcosm – if Çatak excluded all other students entirely from the film but he doesn’t, as a daft episode involving the school newspaper illustrates.

Carla, though supposedly under a cloud, decides unilaterally to go ahead with an interview with the student-run newspaper and visits the editorial office.  At first, one of her own pupils, Hatice (Elsa Krieger), asks the questions, which are undemanding.  Then other, noticeably older students interrogate Carla – about the secret recording, the accusations of theft made against Ali, Friederike Kuhn’s suspension – and she struggles to answer their questions.  Flustered, she asks to see the text of the article before it goes to press; the students agree to this but, in the event, go ahead without consulting Carla, who’s dismayed to see her words distorted and her views misrepresented.  The published interview causes mayhem in the staffroom and Dr Böhm puts a stop to distribution of the paper (though it’s not clear how she can so late in the day).  In the staffroom bust-up, Thomas Lebenwerda reasonably accuses Carla of talking with the students while failing to consult colleagues.  Çatak supplies no motive for this reticence on her part – he just requires it, for purposes of the newspaper interview and its fallout.  Or thinks he does:  since, by this point, nearly all of Carla’s class has virtually gone on strike – refusing to participate in lessons or to do homework – in protest at what’s happened to Oskar and his mother, it’s hard to see why the narrative needs the interview fiasco too.

Two sequences stand out as intentional departures from realism, one more successful than the other.  Carla, plagued by self-doubting anxiety, imagines scores of staff and students wearing white blouses/shirts just like Friederike’s walking down a school corridor.  This sticks out too blatantly as a highlight image (especially when nothing comparable happens in Carla’s mind subsequently).  It also sharpens the viewer’s awareness of the pattern on the blouse:  couldn’t Çatak have chosen something other than yellow stars, in view of their connotations from Nazi Germany?  (If he intends a connection with the Jewish yellow stars, this seems excessive and tasteless.)  The second sequence, Carla’s last session with her class as a whole, works much better.  She apologises for all that’s gone wrong and invites the children to join her in what proves to be a prolonged scream.  The children are happy to break their vow of silence for this and Carla enjoys releasing some of the tension inside her.  The Teachers’ Lounge, rather than neatly distinguishing heroes from villains, and oppressors from victims, seems, rather, to say that trying to get things right, when things are complicated, is liable to result in getting them wrong.  It might therefore have been better for Çatak to end things with this couldn’t-you-just-scream moment than in the way he actually does.  Oskar, despite his suspension, returns to the classroom, sits down and refuses to leave.  The other children exit and Carla locks herself inside with Oskar.  Nothing much happens, except that he produces the Rubik’s cube he received from Carla earlier in the story (and which you might have guessed would reappear).  She told him he could keep the cube until he’d worked out how to solve its puzzle; he now does so in a matter of seconds.  Çatak’s parting shot is a puzzle in itself.  As the closing credits begin, we see Oskar – silent, dignified, still seated in his chair – being carried from the classroom by police officers.

İlker Çatak’s relentless focus on events in the school does succeed in tautening his film’s atmosphere and tempo, which Gesa Jäger’s editing helps to reinforce.  What really saves The Teachers’ Lounge, though, is the quality and Çatak’s orchestration of the acting.  In Michael Haneke’s masterly The White Ribbon (2009), Leonie Benesch was the teenage sweetheart of the young schoolteacher played by Christian Friedel.  It was her second cinema role and his first; it’s striking, fifteen years later, to see them as the protagonists of this film and The Zone of Interest respectively.  In the meantime, Benesch has appeared (as did Friedel) in Babylon Berlin, the international hit German drama series – as well as, more recently, in the predictably woke but entertaining version of Around the World in 80 Days shown on the BBC (and in continental Europe).  She was excellent in both but those television performances hardly prepare you for the command displayed bv Leonie Benesch to carry a feature film like The Teachers’ Lounge:  she’s very impressive.  In a fine supporting cast, Eva Löbau and Michael Klammer are particularly strong – along with Leonard Stettnisch, as troubled, troubling Oskar.

6 April 2024

[1] I didn’t know the term ‘teachers’ lounge’, the North American equivalent of staffroom, before seeing it as this film’s English title.  I’ll stick with staffroom throughout this note.