The Teachers’ Lounge - Review Thread

High school movies, as a genre, are kind of a mess. They’re movies that are so beholden to certain clichés and tropes developed especially in the 80s and even the best of them are sort of stuck reacting to and subverting those tropes rather than doing their own thing. As such it’s often been the movies set in middle schools that have been able to do their own thing and be honest in their own ways in part just because the field isn’t over-saturated. We saw this in 2018 with Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, a movie about everything terrible about being a thirteen year old and the peer environment school provides them. We also saw that in the 2006 film Half Nelson, about a teacher with a secret life who isn’t the savior he thinks he is. And we perhaps saw it most vividly in the Palme d’Or winning but still underappreciated 2008 French film The Class, which spends a lot of its time just sitting inside a classroom at what (I think) is the French equivalent of a middle school and seeing how the teaching process plays out with them. I was particularly reminded of that film when watching the new German film The Teachers’ Lounge, which is certainly a more dramatic and plot driven movie than The Class but which nonetheless has a core of what feels like an authentic look at the challenges of teaching in a modern multi-cultural European middle school.

The film focuses on Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a teacher at a German middle school who begins the film seeming like an exemplary representative of her profession. She’s dedicated to her students and fair-minded and understanding in her interactions with them. There has been trouble at this school though as there have been a series of thefts in the building that has had administration doing a bunch of searches that have people uneasy. In an attempt to uncover these thefts Nowak tries leaving a camera on in her laptop and this shoots a video that seems to implicate a co-worker named Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau) whose son, Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), is the star pupil in Nowak’s class. When she tries to confront Kuhn about this she denies everything and throws the mother of all fits when this evidence is presented to administration. Word of all this gets back to the class and it raises a lot of questions and starts dividing people and Oskar seems to be in the middle of a lot of this and things start to devolve from there.

Before we even get into that whole deteriorating situation I want to take a moment to talk about how authentic this movie feels just as a classroom depiction. The school looks and feels like what I’d expect one to look like, but really it’s the people who stand out. The students are played by actual age-appropriate tweens and they are scripted to act in ways that feel immature in just the right ways that you expect kids of this age to act in. On top of that the staff feels believably imperfect: not bad people by any means but not above petty squabbling and the principal feels like exactly the kind of image conscious. Then of course there’s Carla herself, who prior to all the drama certainly seems like the model of what a teacher is supposed to be: fair, patient, able to communicate with the children. It’s in large part because the film has set up a pretty pleasant status quo in this school that it really feels like there’s a lot at stake when everything starts to go a bit haywire when the main plot kicks in. However, there is an argument to be made that for all her strengths, Carla’s tragic flaw is here unwillingness to let these thefts go and instead starts chasing down this petty larcenist with a Javert-like zeal that leads her to engage in questionable tactics and then snitch on another staff member and in this sense everything that came after is kind of her own fault.

I don’t really see it that way though. Instead in a lot of ways this seems like more of a study in the absolute brazen-ness of Kuhn and her son in avoiding accountability through denial and how this in some ways this parallels Donald Tump and similar corrupt officials. Kuhn seems to be pretty obviously guilty, certainly as guilty as any number of children that Nowak discipline’s every day and her unhinged reaction to the “accusation” and subsequent manipulations just make her look even more guilty, and yet she still goes scorched earth despite having no real evidence beyond the equivalent of saying “fake news.” And yet she’s able to effectively turn people against the authorities in charge while basically gas lighting them into second guessing themselves and dithering about all this, essentially by exploiting the fact that they have a sense of shame and an interest in due process. Meanwhile the media (the school paper) seeks sensationalism in all this while the people in authority who should be showing a united front against this bullshit, the teachers, end up bickering amongst themselves instead of taking action. The principal seems to be the one person able to meet the moment, in part because she doesn’t mind being disliked, but Nowak seems uniquely incapable of this in part because the she seems rather uneasy about exerting authority at all and kind of doesn’t know how to enforce rules without self-flagellating about it.