The Teachers' Lounge 2023 Movie Review Trailer

 Anyone in Germany who thinks about school movies at night quickly loses sleep. It doesn't sound entirely clean, nor is it entirely true, but most of the time it is, and Heine always fits, you don't even have to go back very far, just think of Sönke Wortmann's Enclosed Society, which once again showed how the year past How low can one stoop to destroy an intrinsically relevant sociotope, on which an entire society stands or falls, in a scandalous film.

But luckily there is another way, luckily there is İlker Çatak, who has already demonstrated with his last two films, The Spoken Word (2019) and Robber's Hands (2021), that he can translate socially relevant themes into a complex and cinematic language. creative. can transfer.

Director: Ilker Çatak
Writers: Johannes Duncker, Ilker Çatak
Stars: Leonie Benesch, Leonard Stettnisch, Eva Löbau

This also applies to Çatak's The Teacher's Room, which essentially tells the story of a robbery in a high school teachers' room. The theft of a small sum of money would hardly cause a stir, but Carla Nowak, portrayed in an exciting and ambivalent way by Leonie Benesch, who has only been at the school for a short time and has established a clearly hierarchical spirit of justice with her students, sees it in a different way. different and disagrees. This creates a cascade of justice that, in its drama and radicalism, recalls the fate of Michael Kohlhaas in Heinrich von Kleist's great novella.

Çatak and his screenwriter Johannes Duncker tell this central story with confidence and authenticity, which may also be because they both drew on personal experiences: Çatak attended a school in Turkey from the eighth grade, where he felt the wallets of male students witnessed for teaching. Staff and Duncker's sister, as a maths teacher, faced the fallout from the theft in her own staffroom.

This daily life in the staff room is realistically depicted by Çatak in quick cuts. He introduces the usual “clique behavior” of teachers, which is not much different from that of students, in which there are also outsiders and leaders and exclusions are equally part of the group process. Carla is increasingly affected by this exclusion the more she advocates for a “just” solution to the problem and takes justice into her own hands and, in an enervating downward spiral, she has to realize that justice can create injustice and that a solution is necessary. there is no solution and understanding there is no understanding.

This may sound a bit like vigilante movies, the so-called vigilante genre, stories about ordinary people who, after an attack on themselves, their friends, their family or society, take the law into their own hands and become against the perpetrators or against the entire society. revenge so we can finally wake up in a better world. 

But Çatak with his Carla takes a different path than Ilja Naischuller with his hero Hutch in Nobody: he involves the entire society through the staff of his film: the other teachers, the director and also the students and their parents, without forgetting the school newspaper. – and shows how the big world works with minimal effort through the small school world. Or it just doesn't work. It shows systemic racism, it shows how fake news and the pillory qualities of social media arise, and it shows how truth takes on new meaning through the new paradigms of cancel culture and, above all, it begs the question fundamental of where the law ends, injustice begins, and when judgment and prejudice begin. can hardly be distinguished. And, therefore, it is very close to Foucault and the viral boils of an omnipresent disciplinary society.

Beneath this quasi-philosophical superstructure, some dialogue occasionally actually sounds like this superstructure, with one or two things overexplained rather than developed through dialogue. But Çatak eventually navigates these dangerous rapids without suffering too much damage. 

This is also because his excellent ensemble, consisting of Eva Löbau, Leonard Stettnisch, Michael Klemm, Rafael Stachowiak, Anne-Kathrin Gummich and Kathrin Wehlisch, not only acts as a representative of the complex cosmos of ideas that extends here, but also as a representative of your team There is enough room to develop the necessary density of character and thus link the theory so finely with a closely observed, realistic and never predictable everyday school life.

And that's as ambivalent and clever as the basic premises of this dark drama.

Watch The Teachers' Lounge 2023 Movie Trailer