‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’, intones a senior teacher, ominously, within the first five minutes of The Teachers’ Lounge, this year’s International Film Oscar entry from Germany. It’s a very fitting, Gestapo-esque line to really kick this film off, eerie and foreboding but also clangingly unsubtle, good preparation for the effectively tense but also wildly overblown story that writer-director Ilker Catak is about to impart – one of a minor act of theft that veers into a showdown about the very heart and soul of education.
At the centre is Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a teacher for a class of rather bright 12 year olds, new to the school and struggling to adapt to the other teachers’ cliques. We start with the teachers’ lounge already on edge – a series of thefts have them pointing fingers at students, in particular one of Carla’s students, a boy of Turkish descent named Ali. Both empathetic to the kids in her care and clearly disgusted by the racial profiling at play (though less direct, Carla’s own Polish origins obviously inform the dismissive attitudes of her German-born colleagues), Carla decides to find the real culprit.
It’s in this investigation, though, that Carla manages to bring her own world down around her head, discovering that it’s actually a staff member behind the stealing – facilities manager Ms Kuhn (Eva Lobau), whose furious reaction to being caught is made all the more disruptive by the fact that her son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) is in Carla’s class. It’s in this setup that The Teachers’ Lounge is at its best, genuinely tense and anxiety-inducing as justice, of a sort, is served in a way that completely explodes any sense of stability and security at the school for both the teachers and the kids.
Aided by an overly insistent but bluntly effective score, Catak puts us right in the thick of deeply uncomfortable staff discussions and high-stakes office politics (the police are involved, while parents grow wary and angry). As Carla’s crisis of conscience about turning Ms Kuhn in grows, though, so too does the film become exponentially less convincing. Carla’s well-meaning guilt pretty swiftly just becomes frustrating, leaving her utterly unable to stand up for herself or confront issues in any sort of direct or sensible manner, while most of the other characters are also really, really annoying. Ms Kuhn is self-evidently terrible, the rest of the teachers are snarky idiots, while the kids, who are all pre-teens, are written like they’re approaching college age.
Scenes of solidarity-based homework strikes and a hilariously idealistic school newspaper might have worked if these students were 16 or so, but the end result does just end up feeling like children saying adults’ words, a common but still significant problem for this genre. As the drama reaches a fever pitch, it’s almost like a mass hysteria sets in at the school, which is undeniably punchy, but Catak doesn’t quite commit all the way with this (like, say, Carol Morley did with The Falling), dampening the ending.
As a thriller about the surveillance state that a school pretty much inherently is, The Teachers’ Lounge is intense and pacey, consistently compelling if not quite gripping. But it often undoes itself – school dramas, even ones mostly about teachers, live and die based on the believability of their child casts, and Catak falls pretty flat here. Caught awkwardly between clear-eyed social realism and something more heightened, a disconnect grows steadily as the story progresses and the end result, though it does entertain, is something just a little too hollow.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 