How Does ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ Play on our Fears About the Truth?
This award-winning German film uses a simple school setting to ask: when everyone has their own version of the truth, who do we believe?
We all remember our school days, right? Your eyes are wide, emotions are big, and scandal travels like lightning. It’s also our first taste of how the world works, with its procedures, authority figures, besties and bullies.
It’s a metaphor that Turkish-German director İlker Çatak plays with cleverly in The Teachers’ Lounge, his gripping Oscar-nominated drama about the ramifications of a petty theft in an everyday German high school.
While the story may be told on a modest scale, the questions it raises are much bigger: are we really innocent until proven guilty? Can idealism do more harm than good? And could an accusation ultimately be more damaging than the crime itself?
What’s The Teachers’ Lounge about?
The Teachers’ Lounge is a great encapsulation of just how challenging teaching can be: you’re an educator, a counsellor, a politician and (sometimes) a hostage negotiator all in one. ( Side note: pay teachers more!)
30-something Carla (Leonie Benesch) is a good educator, dealing firmly but fairly with the usual naughty pre-teen stuff amid her maths & PE lessons. She’s also a generous person driven by principle, always dropping change in the staffroom piggy bank when she pours her morning coffee — even after she spots other co-workers pinching coins instead.
While Carla’s clearly the moral centre of this story, she’s new to this school, which undermines her trust with some of the other teachers. They seem a bit “eyeroll” at her earnestness, and she knows it. Her intentions are good, but it feels like Carla’s an outsider, walking on eggshells. That sense of “me versus them” only gets wider as she navigates a new issue at school.
Money keeps vanishing from people’s wallets, and her students don’t seem to know (or want to tell) who the culprit might be. Carla’s perturbed when her fellow teachers use psychological tactics to coerce the answers they want from students. They’ve seen it all before — they’re jaded, and they fill in the blanks on behalf of the students. This bothers Carla, who’s hardwired to give the benefit of the doubt.
But in her pursuit of justice, she makes a decision that threatens to undo her moral code. To catch the real perpetrator she decides to leave her laptop camera on, aimed at her unguarded handbag in the teachers’ lounge. The video shows her bag being rifled through by a faculty member in a distinctive blouse — case closed right? But the staffer denies it FURIOUSLY, and distracts by pointing a moral finger right back at Carla: who are you to make secret recordings in the workplace?!
To make things worse, the woman is the mother of Carla’s best student, who soon bears his mother’s alleged guilt by being ridiculed and ostracised by his classmates. As rumours spiral out of Carla’s control, we’re invited into the moral greyness of The Teachers’ Lounge — a story about presumptions, and how once the first accusation is made, the damage can’t be undone.
“I think the film is a commentary on our debate culture. We see with Carla a person who wants to do everything right, but fails again and again. Ilker has captured something essential of our present.”
~ Actress Leonie Benesch
How does The Teachers’ Lounge touch on racial profiling?
After the first theft, two of Carla’s most trusted students quietly point to Ali, a Middle Eastern student, who has a suspicious amount of money on the day in question. Ali’s parents are brought in to face Carla’s colleagues, who clearly feel that it’s a pretty open and shut case. But without any real proof, has Ali’s race played into their preconceptions? His offended parents certainly seem to think so — and Carla is clearly uncomfortable.
Later, when Carla mentions to other teachers that Ali is in danger of flunking her class, the talk swings back to their doubts about him. What do the parents do for work? one asks. We pick up Carla’s alarm at this casual racism being posed so lightly. “How is that relevant?” The answer she gets back feels like the kind of shrugging-off that prejudiced people have used forever: “Okay, it was a simple question!”
Carla’s best student Oskar is mixed race, which means we don’t at first realise that Ms. Kuhn — the office admin and accused thief, who’s white — is his mother. It’s a savvy choice by Çatak and his co-writer Johannes Duncker which leads us to question our own perceptions. What else are we assuming about Ms. Kuhn’s home life (which is never shown) when we understand that Oskar’s father isn’t white? Perhaps she’s a single mother, which might explain her need for extra money — but to make that justification, isn’t our own profiling coming into play?
Çatak and Duncker are pointing out that when we don’t have hard facts, human beings tend to fall back on bias and prejudices. According to ScienceDaily, prejudice is “hard wired into the human brain as an adaptive response, to protect our prehistoric ancestors from danger”. But in an inclusive society, that’s the opposite of how we’re supposed to be. The result? Fairly navigating a sensitive social issue, like theft or lying in the workplace, can be a tense and complicated battle.
The truth isn’t always the winner — sometimes, it’s whoever makes the strongest case.
“It is about a system, about a reflection of our society. We live in absurd times … the film was an attempt to depict this confusion of our time.”
~ Director Ilker Çatak
What does The Teachers’ Lounge have to say about the damage of presumptions and accusations?
The crux of the story lies in how Oskar, an innocent party (and a great student) is affected by the actions of those around him. Carla set her laptop recording to try and exonerate another boy (Ali) but by doing so, she created further painful ramifications. Technically, she violated other teachers’ rights to personal privacy too. As the Principal talks of police reports and charges, Carla knows she’s made a mistake, but can’t stop the circus tent collapsing around her.
We begin to sense a real air of apprehension in the social fabric of the school. In one brilliant scene, Carla envisions everyone — staff, students, men, women — wearing the same blouse as the video thief. A hallucination, perhaps, driven by Carla’s self-doubt? Or a representation of our OWN doubts about the culprit?
Çatak’s big point is that there are more opinions (and therefore, more “truths”) now than ever. Inclusion has led to far more voices in the room, and that’s great — but it also means we’ve all become judges and juries. Like Carla, we’re all on eggshells trying to do the right thing… but doesn’t all this tiptoeing around get exhausting?
“A central aspect for me is the search for truth, or how one comes to believe in the truth. But it’s also not about making a statement, it’s about asking a question.”
~ Director Ilker Çatak
On top of this, today’s media and news cycles demand clean, binary viewpoints: right & wrong, left & right, innocent & guilty. Which side are you on? Case closed! Next. But life is far more layered than that. It isn’t always possible to have a simple take on complex issues.
The Teachers’ Lounge uses two critical scenes to illustrate this. First, Ms. Kuhn crashes a school parents’ evening, urging Carla to “tell the whole story”. She’s dripping with rain, spitting her words, almost sounding deranged — but her angry version of Carla’s actions (“Spying! Slander! Character assassination!”) begins to convince the room. A bit like your Aunty’s Facebook — or a certain former US President — it’s easy for loud nonsense to drown out passive truths.
The other key scene is Carla agreeing to an interview with the school paper, which quickly becomes an interrogation. Will Ms. Kuhn return? Will Oskar change schools? Was there really a secret recording? Again, Carla’s actions — agreeing to help the school paper fill its pages — come from a good place, but perhaps in this case it’s a naive one. When the article is printed, it has decontextualised the whole event, with damaging quotes from Ms. Kuhn explaining the “flip side.” Suddenly, we see how compelling the story looks from that side. The tide’s turning, and it’s threatening to pull her under.
So what’s the takeaway from The Teachers’ Lounge?
The Teachers’ Lounge is an ethical journey, one that could easily be read as allegory for any tricky modern-day moral quandary. It may have a ‘small screen’ feel, but we promise this is one of those films that ensnares you. The film pulls you onto a moral see-saw ride that’s so riveting, you’re surprised when the credits roll.
It’s a testament to the performances (led by Leonie Benesch, who won the German equivalent of the Oscar for her role) that we’re fully convinced we’re watching real teachers shepherding the next generation of pre-teens. Çatak and cinematographer Judith Kaufmann capture each scene with a cracking authenticity, choosing to shoot in a “square” 4:3 aspect, not cinematic widescreen. It deepens the illusion further that we’re seeing a true slice of life.
Çatak reminds us that “the truth” might never be identical to how your neighbour sees it. But we ALL have neighbours — and just like school classmates, we can’t choose who sits at the next desk. In a social system with millions of “truths”, The Teachers’ Lounge is a compelling example of the classic old aphorism: When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you.
Originally published at https://good.film.
