Those for whom school or its corridors have been synonymous with anxiety will revisit familiar feelings when viewing The teachers’ roomIlker Çatak’s fourth feature film and Oscar finalist for Best International Film, which transforms the joyous chaos of a German high school into oppressive suspense.
Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) has just started a contract teaching mathematics and physical education in a seventh grade class. As good at her job as she is at winning the hearts of her students, she gradually loses her bearings when a series of thefts arouses the suspicions of the children and the staff.
Required to attend the interrogation of the alleged culprit, one of her young students, as well as the reaction of parents outraged by the racism underlying such suspicion, Carla decides to take matters in hand and find the perpetrator herself.
One afternoon, while she was secretly filming the staff room with her laptop, she had money stolen from her coat. From a blouse sleeve visible on her recording, she accuses the school secretary, Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau), who is immediately suspended. From then on, Carla will have to navigate between the indignation of parents and colleagues, the rumor machine, the student newspaper, as well as aggressive children, including the son of the main interested party, determined that his mother’s dismissal will not happen. do not go unpunished.
Before the stunned spectator, the tension closes in an embrace around the young teacher, who multiplies bad decisions and missteps, instilling, in her mind as in that of the audience, a litany of doubts on which the screenplay wisely avoids. draw any conclusion.
Marrying the moods of the protagonist, Ilker Çatak’s production exacerbates the nervousness and the impression of confinement, all carried as much by the naive and skin-deep acting of Leonie Benesch as by the leitmotif of the composer Marvin Miller , which accompanies each twist of the situation with haunting and disturbing violins.
From take to take, the camera oscillates between flight and lethargy, rushing behind Clara in endless corridors with a labyrinthine appearance or freezing in a fixed shot to watch the people and their irascibility pass by, without managing to anchor itself in anything. .
As the professor becomes more distraught, the cinematographer, Judith Kaufmann, blurs the color palette to create an increasingly cold and distant atmosphere, as if the corridors that Clara walks every day were becoming unknown to her.
Drawing on a banal context, Ilker Çatak builds a story in tune with his times by raising questions that cross borders and cultures on the education system, the loss of faith of teachers, systemic racism, the child king, the media crisis and, ultimately, the decline of democracies. A film as intelligent as it is thrilling.