The Teach­ers’ Lounge review – a chain-reac­tion melodrama

In ​‘Micro­cos­mo­graphia Acad­e­mia’, his satir­i­cal trea­tise on uni­ver­si­ty pol­i­tics, Edwar­dian schol­ar F.M. Corn­ford pro­posed that, ​“there is only one argu­ment for doing some­thing; the rest are argu­ments for doing noth­ing. The argu­ment for doing some­thing is that it is the right thing to do. But then, of course, comes the dif­fi­cul­ty of mak­ing sure it is right.”

Such are the emphat­i­cal­ly rhetor­i­cal prin­ci­ples, the rules of inac­tion, that impel İlker Çatak’s Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed The Teach­ers’ Lounge, a dra­ma set in a Ger­man sec­ondary school rat­tled by accu­sa­tions of theft. For sev­enth-grade teacher Car­la (Leonie Benesch, tedious­ly ultra-tense), a sen­si­tive edu­ca­tor who innate­ly sees her­self on the side of the stu­dents, the inci­dents hold the ide­al­is­tic promise of a teach­able moment, until her efforts to do some­thing about them inflict irrec­on­cil­able dif­fi­cul­ties that Corn­ford, who’d been writ­ing about the Cam­bridge scene in 1908, could have hard­ly fore­seen. After all, nobody had smart­phones back then.

The staff’s efforts to iden­ti­fy the thief leads first to vio­la­tions of pupils’ rights, as in a meet­ing between Car­la, her sin­gle-mind­ed col­leagues, and two stu­dents they pres­sure into iden­ti­fy­ing class­mates they pre­sume to be guilty. Once one of her stu­dents is sus­pect­ed, Car­la believes wrong­ly, she sur­veils the teach­ers’ lounge, leav­ing her lap­top cam­era to record some­body lift­ing cash out of the wal­let she left in her jack­et. Rec­og­niz­ing a pat­tern vis­i­ble on the sleeve of the shirt the appar­ent thief was wear­ing, Car­la iden­ti­fies sec­re­tary Ms Kuhn (Eva Löbau).

Yet Kuhn denies the charges so vehe­ment­ly it takes Car­la by sur­prise and caus­es oth­ers to ques­tion their alle­giances. Mak­ing mat­ters worse, Car­la has Kuhn’s son, Oskar (Leonard Stet­tnisch), in class; hav­ing alien­at­ed a promis­ing stu­dent, Car­la fights to regain his trust.

The idea of schools as micro­cosms of soci­ety, reflect­ing polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic dynam­ics while serv­ing as self-con­tra­dict­ing sys­tems of inclu­sion and exclu­sion, is well-estab­lished. Jean Vigo’s clas­sic Zero for Con­duct cap­tures youth in revolt through anar­chic inter­play of real­ism and sur­re­al­ism that hon­ours childhood’s poten­tial; Fred­er­ick Wiseman’s High School, mean­while, was the documentarian’s first study of civic engage­ment and social struc­tures sub­sum­ing individuals.

Less pro­duc­tive­ly, more trendi­ly, Çatak’s film becomes a chain-reac­tion melo­dra­ma: act­ed by self-seri­ous types, scored by tight­ly wound strings, depen­dent on char­ac­ters say­ing the wrong things and leav­ing the right ones unsaid with jaws firm­ly, sar­don­ical­ly clenched. No sit­u­a­tion is resolved, no assump­tion proven; nobody’s lis­ten­ing, just react­ing as if written.

Ruinous as it is, the action remains rhetor­i­cal, even as it esca­lates. Savvy in their choice of sce­nario, Çatak and co-writer Johannes Dunck­er emerge cal­low and obliv­i­ous in their gener­ic, moral­is­tic cri­tique of the codes of con­duct gov­ern­ing our schools. Fore­cast­ing an abstract dooms­day, they intro­duce an omi­nous count­down that nev­er hits zero, draw­ing few con­clu­sions and even less blood.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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