School tends to feel like a world unto itself. Its stony walls seem to tower if we are students, or seem to cloister if we are teachers, closing us off from the rushing and tangled fervor of the outside world. Its rooms and departments like various countries or hemispheres consume all our attention when we’re within the building. School often feels like a self-sustaining community, its various happenings thriving despite or perhaps regardless of the mayhem of the complexities beyond its doors. This richness that school possesses, the grand role it plays in the lives of students and teachers, is something Ilker Çatak-directed Teachers’ Lounge not only grasps but brilliantly achieves itself, using the setting to deeply profound effect.
The film is housed entirely within a school. Leonie Benesch delivers a brilliantly restrained performance as Clara Nowak, a young sixth grade teacher whose teaching methods differ from her colleagues; she approaches her students with openness and respect. When the school is besieged by a series of thefts and one of Clara’s students is accused on the basis of hearsay as opposed to any meaningful evidence, the teacher takes it upon herself to discover the real thief. After gathering evidence and realizing one of her colleagues might be the culprit, Clara embarks on a journey toward achieving justice that spirals out of her control, negatively impacting her grasp on reality, one of her own students, and the whole school.
A world unto itself, Teachers’ Lounge is an amazing achievement for the way in which it serves as a near sociological meditation. A smart and expertly-wound film, it takes its subject seriously as it observes through its captivating protagonist the snowballing inflection of a singular act. Ultimately, though, the film is simple in its profoundness because of how it hews to its protagonist, effectively reminding us of our humanity, which we tend to forget in the fray of messy societal concerns.
Judith Kaufmann’s cinematography sticks close to Benesch’s Clara, and excitingly complements the suspense in the story that Çatak co-wrote alongside Johannes Duncker. Much of the plot hinges on perception, toying with the singular process of making assumptions based on observable reality. As Clara relays lessons about the difference between assumptions and evidence-based conclusions, speaking to how the latter is always a safer option to the former, we find that she herself is taken in by the beguiling nature of assumptions when she accuses a colleague of theft under the persuasion of dubious evidence. The film is an achievement for the way it so deftly prompts such rife ideas about ourselves and the society we’ve built through a fairly straightforward premise and its narrow, oftentimes suffocating, commitment to Clara’s perspective. As Clara realizes her mistake — that she perhaps jumped to conclusions — Kaufmann’s lens tightens around the panicking Clara, which in turn makes us panic, and prompts us to turn inward.
The film skillfully balances an ironic flair against sympathetic social critique, allowing moments of absurdity to naturally reveal themselves in the childish behaviors of the adults, juxtaposed against the organized self-awareness of the kids. As the film meaningfully considers the sprawling effects of a single, well-intentioned action within a paranoid framework, it works to present a subtle but slick allegory. Because the film never leaves the school grounds, even as it spans the course of a few days, we as viewers feel all the more poignantly the all-consuming power of the events unfolding around Clara, for whom the accusation and its effects have taken on towering and dire proportions. In this way, the film is able to not just replicate the way that school often becomes one’s only world, but also imbue this feeling to us, as viewers, having Clara’s ordeal become in turn our own.
Clara’s school, the scandal, swallow us in the way that a mishap in our own lives might swallow us, and in this way the film works as a cunning microcosm for the workings of society. We see reflected back at us our collective desire to find a person, any person at all, to blame when a heinous and indiscriminate crime takes place, even if they are innocent, just so long as personal loss is put to an end, just so long as the threat might be apparently assuaged.
The film, through Clara’s misstep, compellingly shows how even the most scientific, water-tight methods of investigation (building up evidence and forming an apt conclusion, as opposed to mere assumption) leave room for doubt, can be flawed at best; and, even if we feel better for the accusation, nothing in society takes place within a vacuum, what happens to one member, impacts everyone; the accusation can be life-destroying within the particular.
But even aside from all its big, allegorical pronouncements the film very gracefully makes, there is another layer on which it excels: the respect it shows to the kids. Just as Benesch delivers a pitch-perfect, taut performance as the caring but stumbling teacher, all the young actors in the film (especially Leonard Stettnisch as the silent but strong-willed young Oskar whose mother is accused by Clara) are allowed to shine. Çatak and Duncker present the kids not as a monolith, but each as their own person learning alongside the other about justice and their own feelings about it. This film shows the will to learn and yearning for justice in the youth, presenting them with grace as they helm this story in equal measure alongside Benesch.
Teachers’ Lounge is a triumph in so many enriching ways, one that will leave you feeling as though you have a lot of existential homework to do.
