The Teachers’ Lounge
Creating an intense thriller about everyday events is no small feat. But when one does come along, it’s a thing of beauty.
And Ilker Çatak’s “The Teacher’s Lounge” is a thing of beauty. It might just be the best movie in this genre since “Uncut Gems” another film where I spent the whole time so nerve wracked by watching realistic characters make bad decisions that I wanted to crawl out of my seat and it doesn’t even have Adam Sandler or Kevin Garnett.
I’m not sure it quite earns the somewhat muted, art cinema style “It’s up to you to decide what happens next” ending that ultimately represents only a tiny fraction of its compact running time, which otherwise puts us in the headspace of Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a young teacher at a German secondary school during an outbreak of stealing that has everyone paranoid and edgy and making choices they’re going to regret later if they have an ounce of decency (some might not).
Carla is a Polish emigre teaching math and phys ed who believes in education as idealism and citizens’ obligation to look out for each other as do-gooding nosiness mostly constructively applied, when one her kids gets hauled out of class to be accused of stealing (on account of an anonymous tip about the unusual amount of cash in his wallet), she has to sit in on a conference with him and his parents as they explain that they gave him the money so he could buy a videogame and suggest racism (they’re Turkish) put them here in this humiliating position.
It sounds valid, and Carla believes it. But it only makes her more paranoid about burglary. The next time she has to leave the teachers’ lounge during break and leaves it, she keeps her laptop open and secretly recording with the video camera. When she comes back, some cash has been taken from the wallet she left in her inside coat pocket. On the tape, someone takes money out of her wallet while she was gone.
And here is where the movie cements its paranoid-thriller bona fides: Just as you never saw who accused the boy or even if he stole money from somebody else, you don’t really see who took Carla’s money just a sleeve of a blouse with a star pattern on it. Same kind of blouse that is being worn by an employee working in an office literally a few feet away from the teachers’ lounge, whom we know could have seen Carla leave because she had an unobstructed view of that through a plate glass window as big as Texas. We are with Carla when she points at this woman and says “That’s her” what were the odds that two women in not-large school would wear same distinctive blouse on same day?
But as things continue to unravel and pile on top of each other, our certainty begins to waver as does Carla’s, indeed, Carla starts to wish that she’d never said anything about stealing or much else, but let me stay ahead of myself for now. This staffer whom she accuses has a son in her class, the boy is understandably upset and angry when his mother is suspended pending investigation, it seems like he then organizes campaign to discredit her in eyes of his classmates at their parents; I say “seems,” because even though he tells Carla directly that unless he gets an apology from her to his mother there will be consequences for which neither one should want to stick around (or words to that effect), we do not hear what, if anything, he did or was going to do to make good on this promise. Throughout the film Çatak gives us closeups of various characters that make us think “That person is lying” or “That person is a thief” or simply “That person is plotting against Carla.” But because the movie is so firmly rooted in her point of view we doubt our assessments at least as often as she doubts hers. (As it happens, though making the recording only put her job on line there’s apparently law or rule against unauthorized personal surveillance on property, and she broke it.)
The best way to consider the movie might be as parable of sorts an everyday institution depicted realistically and accurately in its procedural details but also standing for larger system or set of ideals, like jury room in “Twelve Angry Men,” shipboard in mutiny story. The film handles national, racial and class resentments with same subtlety with which it handles everything else, they’re factors in everything that happens (Carla being Polish gets some othering thrown her way). But we’re not sure about these specifics because so much occurs off our (and Carla’s) line of sight. Terrific directing, terrific cinematography (by Judith Kaufmann), terrific editing (by Gesa Jäger). Every choice seems assertive but right and never worked over, simplicity is key.
Much of the film is made up of continuous shots with no music as people talk, walk and move about within the frame, though composer Marvin Miller’s dissonant, unsettling strings sometimes rise up and seem to whirl around Carla and jab at her.
You know those days or weeks where something bad happens and your response makes it worse, then the response to your response escalates things so that it keeps getting worse and worse, until it feels like you’re digging yourself deeper into a hole? That’s “The Teacher’s Lounge.” Some of you will read that and say, “Thank you for the warning; there is no way I am watching this,” while others will be like, “I’ve got to see this as soon as possible.”
If you do watch it, you’ll know you watched a real movie with its own theme and distinctive aesthetic and strong personality not just more flavorless “content.” Çatak and co-writer Johannes Duncker have hit upon an underserved subsection of the thriller here one with unlimited potential for shedding light on everyday life.
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