Review of the movie The Teachers’ Lounge / Das Lehrerzimmer

Currently, two films from this year’s Oscar nominees in the foreign-language category are being screened simultaneously in Ukrainian cinemas. A week after the launch of Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, the psychological thriller Das Lehrerzimmer was released. Interestingly, both films were made by German directors, although Wenders’ work this time represents Japan. However, not only this time, because a long time ago the German master already made an overview of Yasujiro Ozu’s work and filmed the Japanese capital in the documentary Tokyo-Ga. And it is no less interesting that while the meditative “Ideal Days” shows how to achieve harmony despite chaos and absurdity, the tense “The Teachers’ Lounge”, on the contrary, demonstrates how easily order and harmony can be destabilized and eventually broken.

In the story of The Teachers’ Lounge / Das Lehrerzimmer, in an ordinary modern German school, after a series of thefts, the principal and teachers decide to resort to somewhat radical and ethically imprudent methods of catching the perpetrator by today’s standards. They interrogate the students, carefully, without obvious coercion, prudently emphasizing that everything is “exclusively voluntary”; they slip a journal with a list of names so that the interrogated, who are not very willing to talk, “just point their fingers” at the person they suspect. And then they search the students, again emphasizing that showing personal wallets is “voluntary”: if you don’t want to, you don’t have to, but only if you have nothing to hide.” The school has a zero-tolerance policy, but the situation is obviously ethically complicated when suspicion falls on a non-white boy, the son of Turkish Muslim immigrants, because of the excessive amount of cash in his wallet.

The actions of her colleagues and the administration cause outrage among the new elementary school teacher Karla Novak (a powerful performance by actress Leonie Benes, who is as frank and honest as possible about how sincerity and honesty can paradoxically launch the most manipulative game). She has only been working for the first semester, but she is surprisingly good with children. She is young, politically progressive, and professes idealism and humanism. Her surname, Novak, because she is not a native German, plays on her status as a “newcomer”.

So, after an unpleasant incident with a Muslim boy, Karla Novak, outraged by the injustice of looking for the criminal only among children and not among the staff, decides to conduct her own investigation and catch the thief red-handed: She defiantly leaves her wallet in her jacket hanging on a chair in the teacher’s room and leaves the classroom, turning on the camera on her laptop… This manipulation, seemingly caused by decent and conscientious intentions, unexpectedly leads to catastrophic consequences, among which the scandal of illegal video surveillance turns out to be the least of the problems…

The director and screenwriter of The Teachers’ Lounge, Ilker Çatak, with the surgical sharpness of a ruthless psychoanalyst, or rather an analyst of the collective psyche, turns students and teachers into subjects of a social experiment, in which the school naturally plays the role of a system, and children and teachers personify the people and the government. Given the trends of the modern civilized world, which seems to be trying to get closer to the highest possible degree of liberal democracy (eliminate any manifestations of coercion and discrimination, censorship and bias; introduce a “culture of consent” in everything, etc.), Çatak, in no way promoting any particular socio-political ideology, simply states with imperceptible irony “The more democratic a society is, or at least tries to be, the easier it is to stir it up, to shake it up, to disrupt it, and to plunge it into a state of, so to speak, endless discussion.

Through the prism of the protagonist’s feelings, who finds herself in the epicenter of a snowball of extremely bad and even destructive consequences that multiply and grow exponentially, the director makes the viewer feel the ice underfoot, to feel and be seized with the fear of walking on an extremely fragile surface, when every step, even the quietest and seemingly most careful one, can lead to a rapid fall and, in general, to the undermining and eventual disintegration of the entire “rink”.

Ilker Çatak forces an obviously uncomfortable conclusion: “rigid totalitarianism, which does not allow any nuances and variations, does not allow any admissibility, does not provide for the possibility of dispute and objection, the possibility of searching for unattainable objectivities in spite of the clearly established subjective position of the authorities… It is much easier to maintain order in society with the tools of a sincere democracy, which becomes richer and more inclusive, the more endless the public discussion becomes, which does not imply a final point and a linear solution, just as there is no point in the numbers after the decimal point in the endless periodic decimals that Karla Novak tries in vain to explain to children in math class. However, this does not mean, as the author adds to the intensely problematic picture, that discussion, even without end, is bad, and order is good.

In the end, protest and disagreement, no matter what it is against, are the driving force of the social process as such and the antidote to stagnation. So in the finale of The Teachers’ Lounge, Çatak “crowns” an act of disobedience when the police have to literally carry the protester out of the school on chairs without touching him (so as not to be accused of physical violence). And then the little liberal rebel… looks like an authoritarian monarch on the throne.