TIFF ’23: The Teachers’ Lounge

Das Lehrerzimmer
***/****
starring Leonie Benesch, Leonard Stettnisch, Eva Löbau, Michael Klammer
screenplay by Ilker Çatak, Johannes Duncker
directed by Ilker Çatak

by Bill Chambers At first, I thought the form of The Teachers’ Lounge might be too classically sedate for a quasi-thriller with the dyspeptic energy of an Uncut Gems, but as elementary-school teacher Carla Nowak, a young idealist who’s hyperconscious of power imbalances (a Polish immigrant at a German school, she’s the kind of person who doesn’t like speaking her native tongue with another Polish teacher because it alienates their colleagues), Leonie Benesch is so keyed-up she’s practically an aesthetic unto herself. After a teacher is pickpocketed at school, presumably by a student, Ms. Nowak’s first priority isn’t to the faculty: She doesn’t like that the kids are being encouraged to rat on their own and bristles at the racial profiling of one of her sixth-graders when he’s singled out for having a large sum of money in his wallet. Later, she thinks she’s caught the real thief on camera, long-time receptionist Ms. Kuhn (Eva Löbau), whose son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) is in her class. She confronts the woman in private with every intention of letting her off the hook, but she underestimates the gulf between them in terms of age vs. experience, perhaps, or teachers vs. clerical staff, or spinsterhood vs. working single-motherhood, and Ms. Kuhn’s indignant reaction scorches the earth, forcing Ms. Nowak’s hand. When Ms. Kuhn is put on leave, Oskar tries to pay his mother’s tab with his meagre savings, but the debt, of course, has ballooned past any dollar amount. He demands she make some sort of retraction to clear his mother’s name. Again, not that simple, and it probably wouldn’t do any good, though he’s adamant: “You will apologize in public or you’ll suffer the consequences.”

What ensues is a peculiar battle of wills between Ms. Nowak and Oskar–peculiar because she’s on his side, as much as he tries to slough her off, which transforms it into one woman’s battle to prove she’s the cool aunt. It’s not great for morale, though, this feud with Oskar, nor does Ms. Nowak have the moral high ground, having recorded her colleagues without their consent. In this age of art overexplaining itself, the grey areas of The Teachers’ Lounge are an invigorating change of pace–its most brazen one the matter of Ms. Kuhn’s innocence: She denies the allegations with such conviction that the video proof becomes suffused with doubt. Early on, Ms. Nowak asks her class if 0.999 and 1 are different numbers, given that 0.999 is always rounded off to 1, and it’s a question that resonates as the crimes and punishments, the offenses and defenses, begin to line up on the same plane of wrongness. (The subsequent introduction of a Rubik’s Cube maybe belabours the metaphor.) The Teachers’ Lounge could be said to be about the birth of the centrist position; I guess my only fear, and it’s something sure to be teased out in thinkpieces over the coming months, is whether the picture actually is centrist, which is to say pro-centrism, where Donald is 0.999 and Hilary is 1, so why bother voting. This even starts to curdle into something vaguely fascist, as centrism is wont to do, with Ms. Nowak’s and Oskar’s mounting humiliations and news of the miniature Woodwards and Bernsteins at the school paper getting censored all provoking a tickle of schadenfreude because their passion seems both misplaced and foolish. Still, the haunting final shot is a loss for everyone involved in a way that doesn’t feel equivocating or cynical, just quietly tragic. Programme: Centrepiece