Coercion and conformity, tribalism and prejudice

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This article was published 25/01/2024 (925 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Good intentions go badly awry in this intelligent and affecting drama, set in a German public school.

Thoughtfully underplayed, the story deals with ordinary events and regular people, but it thrums with contagious anxiety throughout its tight runtime. At one point, a hyperventilating teacher is leaning against a bathroom wall, breathing into a bag. I felt a bit that way myself.

Directed by Ilker Çatak, who co-scripted with Johannes Duncker — the two are actually old schoolmates — The Teacher’s Lounge (in German, with English subtitles) follows a dedicated and determined young substitute teacher, Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch of The White Ribbon).

Carla has just started work at a progressive middle school. The windows are big and bright. The classroom design is happy and modern. There’s lots of consensus-building, lots of voting, lots of round-table meetings, lots of student involvement and lots of parental input.

But the school has been unsettled by a series of petty thefts and the repercussions, it turns out, will be anything but petty.

The opening scene dives right in. Two 12-year-old student reps are being asked by teaching staff whether one of their classmates could be a thief. Their participation in this meeting is supposedly voluntary, but they look uncomfortable.

“What can we say if we don’t know anything?” one asks plaintively. Carla is the only adult telling them they don’t have to accuse anyone.

Despite scant evidence, suspicion eventually settles on one student, Ali (Can Rodenbostal). Carla is concerned Ali has been singled out as the son of Turkish immigrants, something that comes up at yet another round-table meeting.

Her sense of injustice roused, Carla wants to clear Ali, but in so doing, she implicates someone else. Soon everyone at the school — teachers, students, parents, administrators and support staff — is riled up and Carla is caught in the middle as the story’s low-key suspense relentlessly closes in.

Catak and Duncker’s script deals delicately with issues of coercion and conformity, tribalism and prejudice. It looks a how misinformation spreads through rumours and misunderstandings.

The issues aren’t overplayed, though. Instead, they come out in brief glimpses. There’s a significant scene with Carla and her class looking at a math problem on the board: “Is it a proof or an assumption?” she asks.

There is some quiet comedy, as when the kids working on the student newspaper, who seemed to have just finished watching All the President’s Men, turn a getting-to-know-you interview with Carla into an aggressive investigative-journalist ambush.

But mostly, there is a feeling of subdued sadness, carried by Benesch’s luminous performance and her guileless, open face. You can see Carla’s transparent joy in ideas when she’s teaching math and her joy in movement when she teaches gym. It’s crushing to watch her get beaten down.

The film is a clear inversion of the popular Saviour Teacher genre — the more Carla tries to help, the worse things get — but it’s not cynical.

Rather, there’s a rueful, humble awareness of individual and institutional fallibility. This is a humanist story, underpinned by the realizations that being a child is hard, being a teacher is hard.

There aren’t clear heroes and villains. Mostly, the characters are trying their best, sometimes doing the wrong thing for the right reason, sometimes the right thing for the wrong reason.

Examining this moral muddle, the film gives viewers a lot to think about, but it’s not telling us what to think. There’s absolutely no political soapboxing.

As progressive ideals are tested by human nature, the school could be seen as a microcosm of liberal democratic society. But parallels are subtle and left deliberately open-ended.

“What happens in the teachers’ lounge stays in the teachers’ lounge,” as one character says as a (kind of) joke. That turns out not to be true, with this illuminating, exploratory film going far beyond this one small school to look at our confused and confusing world.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com