The Teachers’ Lounge is a riveting microcosm of society’s clashing principles
The Teachers’ Lounge (original German title Das Lehrerzimmer) comes from director Ilker Çatak (I Was, I Am, I Will Be), and though you may not have heard of this German arthouse film, it earned numerous end-of-year accolades and is now nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming 96th Academy Awards. The Teachers’ Lounge is a surprisingly gripping allegorical narrative about how seemingly trivial instances, under the right circumstances and involving certain types of individuals, can build up to damaging consequences.
Leonie Benesch (The White Ribbon) stars as Carla Nowak, a first-year teacher at a German middle school. She’s an idealist, dedicated to her students, and always well-intentioned. When a series of thefts occur at the school, and then made worse by ill-advised reactions from the school management and staff, Nowak suddenly finds herself amid battling factions: the teachers, the students, and the students’ parents. As incidents and suspicions mount, what was once a simple, addressable matter becomes a potentially larger-scale sea change. Çatak navigates the slow-burning plot with patience and exactitude, honing in on the subtle nature of social interactions, power dynamics, and miscommunications.
Benesch gives an extraordinary performance, effectively portraying a woman gradually losing control in a spiraling situation. Çatak, who also wrote the script, pits Nowak’s idealism against the school’s bureaucratic processes and an increasingly frustrated student body. In this way, Çatak presents the story as a social parable that isn’t hard to compare to modern society. Çatak has a lot to say about how fixed ideologies can be maddening, and how the deeper one digs their heels in, the harder it is for them to budge. Thankfully, The Teachers’ Lounge is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking and frustrating. We have all experienced elements of Nowak’s journey, and as we put ourselves in her shoes to consider what we would do in her situation, the film becomes all the more impressive for its restraint.
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The Teachers’ Lounge is opening in theaters Friday, February 9th.
