The Teachers' Lounge (İlker Çatak, 2023) (Patreon)

I went into watching The Teachers' Lounge rather naively, since I did not realize it won several majot Lola awards including Best Picture, or that it was Germany's official entry for the International Feature Oscar. I suppose I should have known something was up, since Sony Pictures Classics doesn't pick anything up for distribution anymore unless they think it has some built-in audience or high-profile pedigree. They've really become a terrible distributor over the last several years. But I digress, except to say that the worst aspects of The Teachers' Lounge are the ones that will most likely cause it to connect with mainstream audiences, even though it is a very solid film on the whole.

Although this is a very solid showcase for its veteran lead actress Leonie Benesch, writer-director Çatak tips his hand a little bit with the casting of the film's primary adversary. She is played by Eva Löbau, the unforgettable star of Maren Ade's debut The Forest For the Trees. Like that film's protagonist Melanie, Benesch's Carla Nowak is a beleaguered schoolteacher whose grip on her students, her profession, and her reality proves not to be as firm as she might've thought. The main difference here is that, to some extent, Carla is a victim of circumstance, forced to play all the angles not due to some lack of convictions but because as a public school employee, she has unreasonable demands coming at her from all sides and, despite her students' protestations, she has very little power.

The Teachers' Lounge never deviates from Carla's point of view, which will undoubtedly frustrate some. The film hinges in part on some mysteries, the answer to which we and Carla will never have. But this is a red herring to an extent. The primary objective of Çatak's film is to present work life as a series of impossible situations, all demanding a conscientious profession to make what seem like the best choices in the moment, without our protagonist ever being given the benefit of any larger picture. In the opening scene, a senior teacher (Michael Klammer) and the assistant principal (Rafael Stachowiak) are interrogating two kids, the class representatives, on who they think is responsible for a series of recent thefts. Carla frequently interjects that the students don't have to say anything, but stops short of demanding that her colleagues stop this dubious form of questioning. One kid offers a possible answer, which leads to one of Carla's students being blamed without evidence. The fact that Ali is Turkish only makes matters worse.

Frustrated, Carla takes matters into her own hands, leaving a large sum of money unattended in the lounge and setting her laptop to record the area. And while this appears to identify the culprit, it's Carla who gets in trouble for subjecting the faculty to unauthorized surveillance. In this way, The Teachers' Lounge speaks to a number of conservative-libertarian platitudes regarding the tyranny of institutional bureaucracy. But that's not really what Çatak has on his mind. When the possible thief is confronted, she goes on the offensive, making a stink and threatening legal action. This rhymes with a moment in Carla's math class when she catches a student cheating. He protests despite the clear evidence, and then finally snaps at her, "'Sorry.' That's what you want to hear, isn't it?"

So in a broader sense, The Teachers' Lounge is a kind of institutional black comedy about our post-truth, post-standards Trumpian universe. When you're caught doing wrong, you don't ever admit it. Instead you claim persecution, and argue that the very nature of the investigation, much less the law, is patently unfair, and that it's the victim who is really to blame. Carla is a kind of relic in that she expects her students, and her colleagues, to operate according to an honor code. She thinks cheating is obviously bad; her students, by and large, think it's fine unless you get caught, because the entire educational enterprise is transactional, not driven by any humanistic goal. 

Benesch plays Carla perfectly, allowing us to see the erosion of her sociopolitical naivety in real time. Some critics have found fault with the film's ambivalent conclusion, since it seems to suggest that, whatever the final outcome, Carla has demonstrated her caring and support for her students despite there being very little in it for her. Perhaps this is a German form of wish-fulfillment that reads as alien to a disillusioned American like myself, that at the end of the day integrity really does make a difference. Then again, The Teachers' Lounge quite accurately depicts public institutions as unpredictable moral casinos, where the only certainty is that the house always wins.