“The Teachers’ Lounge”: civilization in the classroom
Teaching, like parenting or skiing or governing or making a souffle, is an activity you can learn about from books and classes and movies, but only really understand on the job. Carla Nowak ( Leonie Benesch), a new teacher in a German school, seems to have arrived in her sixth- grade classroom armed with theories and techniques for gaining the trust and respect of her students. But she’s about to discover, as many a teacher has before, that actually managing a classroom is not as easy as they make it seem on TV.
In some ways, Ilker Catak’s “The Teachers’ Lounge” (which is Germany’s international feature film entry to the Academy Awards) feels like a direct rebuttal to the glut of socalled 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.
But Ms. Nowak’s good intentions are thwarted at every turn. (Everyone uses honorifics in this school, including faculty.) Her students are a typical bunch, a mix of high achievers, dogooders, slackers and cutups. Someone in the school, however, is stealing from others, and nobody can pin down who the perpetrator might be. Ms. Nowak is horrified when another teacher asks student council representatives to snitch, or at least say who they think might be doing it, especially when Ali (Can Rodenbostel) is the one they accuse. He’s the son of Turkish immigrants, and when his parents arrive to explain to the administrators why it wasn’t him, unsubtle racism pervades the room.
This is where it becomes clear that “The Teachers’ Lounge,” despite its realism, is strongest on the allegorical level. The modern classroom has been described by philosophers and theorists as carceral, an institution in which children are indoctrinated into disciplinary systems that will govern their whole lives: in the workplace, in the justice system, in the public square. You must arrive on time, follow rules and schedules, respond to the buzzer, submit to evaluations and repeat it all tomorrow. This school — or at least Ms. Nowak’s part of it — prides itself on its democratic fairness, its freedom of speech and the press, its attitude of self-governance.
But of course, it’s really the teachers who are in charge here, and elements of contemporary society seep in from all sides. Misinformation flies around, helped along by slanted journalism. Teachers demand students open their wallets in a random inspection, telling them that “if
you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” Phones and parents’ group chats create a surveillance society that Ms. Nowak detests, but cannot escape; eventually, suspecting the theft may be coming from somewhere other than the classroom, she sets up her own form of surveillance, with catastrophic results.
Taking on the uneasy complexity of a progressive modern society, and the friction produced when pluralism and an insistence on order and obedience collide, is a bold move, and “The Teachers’ Lounge” pulls it off with a sense of tension that makes the whole thing play like a thriller. There’s a level on which it’s darkly funny, especially if
you’ve spent time around preteens. Every time Ms. Nowak thinks she has a solution, it goes sideways, in
part because you cannot count on sixth-graders to just go along with suggestions from adults. Trying
to build classroom solidarity after an outburst, she selects six students to complete a familiar team-building exercise of the kind that might delight 8-year- olds and mildly irritate adults on a company retreat. Here, though, it ends in predictable bedlam.
A society is not very easy to keep in harmony, and a fully democratic attempt to keep the peace in any group is bound to result in a tug of war between authoritarian and even fascist principles on the one hand and unfettered chaos on the other. Catak places that struggle in a classroom, but it’s clear that like other European directors (including Michael Haneke and brothers Luc and Jean-pierre Dardenne), he’s slyly telling a story about a society much, much larger than the kind found on a campus.
Meanwhile, the students — who are Zoomers, after all — are tuned into the issues around them and ready to fight back. They organize. They refuse to comply. They denounce censorship. They talk about practicing solidarity against “measures otherwise found in rogue regimes” and the “structural racisms that our school, like others, can’t escape.” Their power is limited, but they know how to talk about it. They have learned well from their teachers. But have their teachers learned the lesson, too?