The Teachers' Lounge (2023)

December 5, 2024 3:22 AM

Carla, an enthusiastic new teacher, decides to do something about the petty thefts plaguing the teacher's lounge. It doesn't go great tbh. (Germany, 98min, IMDB 7.4 24k, currently on Netflix.)

NYT: In some ways, Ilker Catak’s “The Teachers’ Lounge” (which [was] Germany’s international feature film entry to the Academy Awards) feels like a direct rebuttal to the glut of so-called magical teacher movies, which abound throughout cinema. In that genre (think of “Freedom Writers,” “Mona Lisa Smile” or “Dead Poets Society”), an idealistic teacher encounters reticence and struggle but manages to break through to her students and make a difference in their lives. Teachers do this, of course, but if you only watched Hollywood’s rendering of the classroom you might think stirring success is inevitable.

RogerEbert.com: It's probably best to think of the film as a parable of sorts, one where an everyday institution is presented realistically, with correct procedural details, but also stands in for a larger system or set of ideals, like the jury room in "Twelve Angry Men" or the ship in a mutiny story. The film handles national, racial and class resentments as subtly as it handles everything else. They're factors in everything that happens (Carla, being Polish, comes in for a bit of "other-ization" herself). But we aren't sure about the specifics because so much happens out of our (and Carla's) sight. The directing, cinematography (by Judith Kaufmann) and editing (by Gesa Jäger) are exceptional. Every choice is assertive and precise but rarely seems labored. Simplicity is key. A lot of the movie consists of steady handheld shots of people talking, walking, and moving through the frame, often without music, although composer Marvin Miller's dissonant, unnerving strings sometimes rise up and seem to swirl around Carla and jab at her.

posted by fleacircus (4 comments total)

One thing I found interesting about this is, unlike another genre of movies like Anatomy of a Fall, I don't think we're really supposed to doubt, deep down, that Ms. Kuhn "did it", but the film also makes us kinda wish it wasn't true after all (like Carla does), so we might doubt after all. There is not really any satisfaction in that knowledge, at all. I love Carla's bitter reaction to the journalism class slogan.

What should Carla have done? What would I have done?

Another thing I like is that Carla's motivations and realizations are not overstated. She doesn't like how the students are being treated, and when she finds out the thief (or a thief) was not a student after all. I think it is effective how the scenes where 2-3 teachers isolate, manipulate, and pressure students seem "normal" even if they are misguided, but adults can't handle that treatment at all. But it's not a "the students are good and the teachers are bad" situation either imho.

I don't really like how things settle quite so much to be about Oskar (and he's carried off like a king...) as the special brightest boy that Carla is trying to reach.
posted by fleacircus at 3:56 AM on December 5, 2024

Torrented! I don't have time for most fiction movies these days, but this looks exception-worthy, God willing. Thanks for sharing about it.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 7:20 AM on December 6, 2024

I saw this in the theater last year, and really liked, up until the last 20 minutes or so. I thought there was a tonal shift at the end that didn't really work for me. But overall, it was one my favorites of the movies I saw in 2024.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:55 AM on December 7, 2024

What was the tonal shift? I wonder if it's what I called becoming all about Oskar.
posted by fleacircus at 3:05 PM on December 7, 2024