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.

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