You wouldn’t expect a movie about teachers to begin with an interrogation. But “The Teachers’ Lounge” is no ordinary film about teachers.
As we follow Ms. Nowak (Leonie Benesch) down the hallway, methodical, tensely wrought music underscores her clipped, no-nonsense gait. She enters a room with two male teachers and two of her students. There have been a series of thefts at the school, and the teachers want the students to give their opinion on who they think the perpetrator is.
The kids insist they don’t know anything – at least not enough to give up a fellow classmate – but the teachers won’t let up. As the interrogation continues, the male teachers become more insistent and the students become increasingly uncomfortable. “I know this is unpleasant for you,” says one of the male teachers to the students. “And not just for you,” Ms. Nowak adds, shifting slightly in her seat, her disapproval written all over her face.
Throughout this interaction, Ms. Nowak plants herself firmly on the side of her students. But “The Teachers’ Lounge” is not so much interested in its protagonist’s good intentions as it is how those intentions can go haywire in a structure ill-equipped to deal with real world complications. Director and co-writer İlker Çatak smartly zeroes in on this tiny, scholastic world to tell a larger story about how fragile the bonds of our social order truly are.
The methods the school takes to uncover the thief continue to unsettle Ms. Nowak until she finally hits her breaking point. When she develops a suspicion that the thief is not a student at all, but a teacher, she decides to take matters into her own hands. Her investigation leads her to levy accusations against a fellow faculty member – one who happens to be the mother of one of her students, Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch). But the questionable methods Ms. Nowak uses to confirm her theory (or so she thinks) lead to a level of paranoia and unrest the likes of which the school has never seen before.
From it’s first scene, “The Teachers’ Lounge” establishes the fact that whatever else she may be, Ms. Nowak is a good teacher. She’s not gregarious in the way we might expect from the more conventional cinematic teacher archetype, but the genuine interest she takes in her students’ well-being is apparent. She doesn’t belittle them for getting answers wrong, but she doesn’t baby them either – she treats them with respect, and they give that back to her in return. Everything Ms. Nowak does stems from a desire to do right by her students. She’s the only teacher who seems even slightly uncomfortable with the probing nature of the thief search, and the only teacher who considers the possibility that perhaps the thief is not a student at all.
But at every turn, Ms. Nowak’s attempts to protect her students, particularly those who are the most vulnerable, are spit back in her face, sometimes by the powers that be and sometimes by her own idealism. She’s eager to guard her students from the ugliness of the adult world – her desire to snipe out the thief comes to fruition after a non-white student with immigrant parents is wrongly accused – but her mistake lies in thinking she could protect them from reality in the first place
After his mother is forced to leave her job while the theft is investigated, Oskar finds himself in a precarious position at school, one the adults in his life can’t (or won’t) fully explain to him out of adherence to protocol. His frustration boils over into active rebellion. Stettnisch delivers that frustration with a painfully sad performance, his adolescent anger working in tandem with Benesch’s tightly clenched rage. In a meeting about how to handle Oskar’s lashing out, two of Ms. Nowak’s students are present as class representatives. One of them makes the point that the students are bearing the weight of the consequences for the adults’ actions. Ms. Nowak’s attempts to protect them – and the faculty’s attempts to wrest control of the situation – have only made the students more vulnerable in the long run.
At its core, “The Teachers’ Lounge” is a story about an institution more interested in maintaining order than doing right by its constituents. But as the film rolls on, order becomes an increasingly foreign concept. In an early scene, Ms. Nowak opens up her class with a morning warm-up, the students and teacher all chanting “good morning” together in unison. By the end of the film, Ms. Nowak trades in that lovely tradition, opting instead to lead her students in a communal, feral scream. Order has left the building.
