Dan Webster reviews "The Teachers' Lounge"

DAN WEBSTER:

Anyone who has ever stood in front of a classroom full of students at any level, kindergarten to college, knows the feeling: how am I going to get along with this diverse collection of personalities? What do they know that I don’t?

These are particularly tricky questions for Carla Nowak, a new teacher at a secondary school in the German film The Teachers’ Lounge, which—directed and co-written by Ilker Çatak—is one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Feature.

Nowak (played by Leonie Benesch) is a young woman whose relationship with her students appears to be as tight as her rapport with school staff and fellow faculty is polite and distant. Tight, that is, before cracks begin to show.

At first, Nowak’s middle-school students seem open to her strict but fair methods. They readily respond to her demands for attention, clap for clap, and her insistence that they take seriously their math assignments.

But when a sticky situation arises and Novak addresses it by doing something arguably unethical and perhaps even illegal, the collective mood of her students changes—as do the attitudes of her school colleagues.

Nowak is then left to figure out how to resolve what gradually becomes a complex and troubled social problem, one that mirrors in so many ways the cultural climate that seems ubiquitous in today’s world.

A German-born filmmaker and the son of Turkish immigrants, Çatak is familiar with such complicated circumstances. He’s said in interviews that parts of his screenplay even mirror his own experiences.

The situation that complicates Nowak’s life is an ongoing series of thefts on the school grounds. Everything from money to supplies has gone missing, including—curiously enough, at one point—a thousand pencils. But it’s the response of the school administration that Nowak finds controversial.

In short, that response entails the pressure the school administrators put on students to cooperate. To Nowak, the pressure amounts to extortion, which she finds especially egregious when the initial investigation takes a suspiciously racist turn. Yet when she voices concerns, she is offered the handy rationalization that anyone who is innocent has nothing to fear.

That incident, though, is only the beginning. When Nowak sees a fellow teacher taking money from a collective coffer in the teachers’ lounge, she begins her own investigation by setting a trap whereby a potential thief will be recorded by her laptop computer.

Her efforts do point to a culprit, but the accusation merely leads to a bigger mess. When a school employee is dismissed, and to Nowak’s horror the police are about to get involved, the students—suspicious of their teacher’s actions—begin to turn against her. Some who had apparently gone along with her classroom methods only reluctantly now are openly defiant.

What’s worse, during a meeting with parents—one of those regular parent-teacher group conferences that most secondary teachers are familiar with—Nowak is confronted with ever more serious questions, many of which she’s not allowed to answer, some that she couldn’t even if she wanted to.

And when, after Nowak grants what she assumes will be a friendly interview with the school newspaper, the student reporters take her comments out of context, making her even more of a pariah at the school.

Çatak captures all this in a narrative that goes from bad to worse to nightmarish. Benesh plays Nowak as an essentially good person, one whose desire to do the right thing takes her down an ever-evolving path that leads if not to actual destruction then at least to a distinct loss of innocence.

That’s the part of The Teachers’ Lounge that echoes today’s world, when truth is relative and there’s no guarantee that good intentions will result in anything close to justice. In the end, Nowak’s students may not learn how to solve complex math problems, but they’re likely to be—for better or worse—more adept at handling 21st century life than their teacher.

For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.

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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is a senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com/7blog.