✯✯½

Everything about The Teachers’ Lounge and its setting, is very ordinary. That might be the perfect way for an audience to be led into a boiling pot, as they try to reckon with everything simmering and getting hotter by the minute, to a point where everything rises to a point it comes beyond one’s control. And it’s very apparent that director İlker Çatak understands that, because it’s very crucial to where the greatest successes of The Teachers’ Lounge come about. It might also be where its greatest shortcomings are apparent.

Leonie Benesch stars as Carla Nowak, an idealistic teacher who seeks nothing but the best in all of her students. Sometimes she can be a little bit overambitious, but she’s known around her colleagues only to be a teacher who’s very dedicated to making sure that her students are getting the best they can. But at her school, these ambitions have shown themselves to have consequences that can’t be so easily reversed; especially with regards to incidents pertaining to a series of thieveries that take place there. Hoping she could put an end to the thieveries, she tries to gather incriminating evidence that puts a fellow staff member at risk, but this starts a chain of events that tarnish her reputation moving forth.

The Teachers’ Lounge plays itself to be a film all about how trying to please everyone around yourself, would inevitably result in another person’s suffering. This is all emphasized from the well-meaning Carla’s relationship with Friederike Kuhn, who at first she accuses of being behind the thieveries. Eventually, the consequences become so much for the well-meaning Carla to bear, especially as Kuhn’s son happens to be one of Carla’s students, but the ramifications of her actions later begin to affect his wellbeing. And of course, it starts some sort of a rebellion against her from the students, later sending Carla down a path in which she regrets what she initially stated.

By the end of it all, The Teachers’ Lounge just fizzles out. It just fizzles out before things truly get heated in a way where you’re hoping things could get more erratic, when you’re considering how the filmmaking is presenting itself. Given how much is happening within the spot that adds to the nature of the circumstances at play: whether they be xenophobia, the invasion of privacy of co-workers, or even the social circumstances of fellow students, it never really goes anywhere. It just seems to fizzle out, like the film itself is backed into a corner, with nowhere else to go. It certainly is what this film seems to think could happen to Carla, but that doesn’t mean it should stop there.

I think that The Teachers’ Lounge has all the material laid out for something great. Unfortunately, it seems like Çatak’s greatest weakness is that he’s trying to do so much within very little allotted time. The foundations for The Teachers’ Lounge are great, because it puts you in the same corner that the students themselves would experience under such circumstances – though it’s a shame that it seems like Çatak finds himself backed into that same position. With how everything slowly boils, he ends before the volcano erupts, leaving us with a picture where pieces seem missing.

---

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Sony Pictures Classics.

---

Directed by İlker Çatak
Screenplay by İlker Çatak, Johannes Duncker
Produced by Ingo Fliess
Starring Leonie Benesch, Michael Klammer, Rafael Stachowiak, Anne-Kathrin Gummich, Eva Löbau
Release Date: May 4, 2023 (Germany)
Running Time: 98 minutes