Director: Ilker Çatak
Writers: Johannes Duncker and Ilker Çatak
Stars: Leonie Benensch, Leonard Stettnisch, and Eva Löbau
Synopsis: When one of her students is suspected of theft, teacher Carla Nowak decides to get to the bottom of the matter. Caught between her ideals and the school system, the consequences of her actions threaten to break her.
Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge has already been compared to Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, and with good reason. Both films observe their core protagonist and let the audience judge what they are seeing and hearing so they can ultimately come to their conclusions based on what they think is the recollection of the facts. The protagonist is also an incredibly unreliable narrator whose true nature is just waiting to be revealed in front of the students and parents, making us unable to trust her (and other side characters) at every turn. It also ends with no legitimate answers to anything that has been presented on screen, entirely depending on the audience’s intelligence to fill in the purposeful gaps in storytelling to figure out if Ms. Nowak’s (Leonie Benensch) money was genuinely stolen by Ms. Kuhn (Eva Löbau).
That is the core of the story, in an elementary school in Germany, a series of petty thefts have been occurring regularly, and the school board is determined to get to the bottom of the problem and find out who has been stealing, which includes frisking the students during class and ganging up to interrogate them. Ms. Nowak does not approve of these techniques but has no choice but to acquiesce with the board’s demands to figure out who has been stealing. One day, she arrives with a large sum of money, which she puts in her wallet and opens her laptop to record the teachers’ lounge, perhaps catching the thief in the act while she is in class.
When she returns, she finds out that her money has been stolen and watches the video to see who did it. We see the fabric of Ms. Kuhn’s shirt reaching her coat pocket but do not see her stealing her money. When confronted with these allegations and the video, Ms. Kuhn vehemently denies all wrongdoing but is suspended pending a police investigation. This begins to cause great strife between Ms. Nowak and Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), Ms. Kuhn’s son, who is a student in Ms. Nowak’s class. He begins to not listen to her, with his behavior becoming more erratic and violent in an attempt to get her to admit the truth.
But what “truth” is it? That Ms. Kuhn didn’t steal Carla’s money? That Ms. Nowak is a liar and has been abusing her authority as a professor to see a financially precarious woman lose her job? Çatak is unconcerned with the binary definition of “truth” and instead prefers that audiences come up with what they believe is the “truth” after seeing Ms. Nowak’s anxiety-ridden plight in attempting to make it up towards her students while everyone slowly turns on her.
One of the film’s key sequences that exposes this exploration of “truth” and “lies” occurs when Ms. Nowak is invited to speak in the school’s newspaper for a profile. What looked to be a simple, innocuous interview is turned into a cross-examination of each one of Ms. Nowak’s alleged “lies” towards Ms. Kuhn, which she attempts to debunk unsuccessfully. By neither confirming nor denying events that may or may not occur and playing the neutral card, a puff piece is written and published in the newspaper that completely twists Nowak’s non-answers to a scathing indictment of her approach to dealing with the situation. When she confronts the students who wrote the article, the editor-in-chief says, “Truth overcomes all bonds. Everything else is just PR.”
And what has Carla been doing in an attempt to defuse the situation? Speak with the board on how to handle it. “How to handle it” sounds awfully like PR to me. As she gets confronted by the student’s parents during a meeting, she regurgitates the same PR-driven answers she is tasked to give to appease concerns but doesn’t say much, which causes the doubt that parents have about the fitness and professionalism of Ms. Nowak to linger. What’s more interesting about this entire set-up is that we are looking at the story through Ms. Nowak’s point of view: there’s never a moment in which the camera cuts to someone else or sees other perspectives for a more balanced version of the “truth.”
Because of this, the story has plenty of missing pieces, including the parents, who are ganging up against her in a WhatsApp group chat to have her removed from the school. We don’t know this is even happening until one of the parents mentions it to her on a phone call, highlighting the viciousness of messages about her regarding her pedagogy and demeanor. And yet, this happens regularly – parents unquestioningly believing everything their kids say and not the one who allegedly exercises power over them by attributing them grades and evaluating their knowledge. However, Ms. Nowak is no saint, and her consistent unreliability in telling the truth, or at least not sugarcoating the seriousness of her accusations against Ms. Kuhn, ultimately stains her reputation as a professor whose power over the students gets flipped in ways she couldn’t imagine.
As the tension continuously mounts in unspeakable dread, with the 4:3 aspect ratio aiding to box Ms. Nowak into a state of pure claustrophobia from beginning to end, the last act of The Teachers’ Lounge grows more violent and brutal, with Carla now having to face her inner demons and warped versions of what she believes is the “truth” while grappling with her mistakes. These deeply unnerving moments are wonderfully anchored by a towering performance from Leonie Benesch, whose psychological torment is intensely felt as soon as the movie turns what she believes is the “truth” against her.
A supporting performance from Löbau is excellent, but the real star of the picture is Stettnisch’s Oskar, whose emotional complexity devastates when he can’t handle the boiling anger inside of him and lashes out against everyone who seemingly takes Ms. Nowak’s side. It’s a hauntingly tragic portrayal of a bright student spiraling into darkness and despair once everyone spreads gossip about him and his mother. At the same time, his academic role model (Ms. Nowak) is responsible for the diffusion of these rumors.
What do you do when your mother – the person you love the most in the world – is accused of something by the person who ultimately determines your fate in the academic sphere? Oskar’s moral choices aren’t easy, and his path progressively grows into something no one should ever experience. But since Çatak is unconcerned with the binary definition of the “truth,” he directly shows what multiple versions of that “truth” decidedly twist many characters’ personalities and emotional underpinnings. It’s one of the most challenging movies that you’ll watch this year because it keeps following a purely distrustful protagonist but one that asks you to take all preconceptions aside and form your own truth based on what you’ve seen and heard. It won’t be easy to draw conclusions and pick all of the pieces together, but one won’t be the same after entering The Teachers’ Lounge.
