I will either educate your children, or eat them
(Das Lehrerzimmer)
dir: Ilker Ҫatak
2023
Why the fuck would anyone be a teacher, honestly? Not only in this day and age, but at any time in human history?
I cannot imagine a more thankless task. Dealing with these dead-eyed little shits, or, even worse, their controlling and awful parents. They’re either checked out or the worst of helicopter parents, bullying teachers into getting their entitled way for their hideous spawn.
I already thought teaching would be the worst possible profession for anyone, let alone myself, before watching this flick, but now, ye gods. All prejudices confirmed.
It’s just a German flick about a teacher, at a school! This is minor, low-key, low stakes stuff! Yet why was watching this film far more stressful than all the thrillers, all the car chases and all the altercations with police that you can ever possibly imagine. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack for at least 80 per cent of the film’s running time.
This is Germany’s entry in the Best International Feature Film category at the upcoming awards, and it’s a good thing it was nominated, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have heard about it. It hasn’t had anywhere near the buzz that Anatomy of a Fall has had, or Zone of Interest, but it’s no less worthy because of that.
I would dare the most extreme of cinephiles to get through this in one sitting without needing to take a handful of valium or at least breathe into a paper bag repeatedly.
Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is a young teacher at a school where she has not been working long enough to have her spirit crushed (yet). She treats the kids in her class, in her care with respect. The kids, being what Americans would call seventh graders, don’t always extend her the same courtesy, but they’re not monsters. They’re not depicted as either delinquents or blonde haired blue eyed Children of the Damned.
But they’re still rambunctious little shits.
Right from the opening scenes, we see that Carla has different beliefs towards the kids than even her fellow teachers do. Because of a number of thefts that have occurred at the school, Carla is reluctantly dragooned into an interrogation with two class captains, being coerced into dobbing in a student the other teachers think probably stole the money.
In case you didn’t know, Germany has a large Turkish population. The kid that is accused, eventually, after arm-twisting the class captains, happens to be Turkish-German.
Why was this kid Ali accused? Was it because he was seen with a wad of cash in his wallet, or because he’s Turkish? When his parents are asked in, they’re also affronted. All the while Carla is trying to pull back the other teachers from the more brutish aspects of their accusations, and apologise to the parents, but the father bluntly states, after being admonished for speaking with his wife in Turkish, that there is no way Ali is a thief, because if he ever stole anything, he knows his father would break his legs.
That’s…not where I thought this was going. The (other) teachers are stymied though, and the thief is still unknown.
There are repercussions for Ali. Some of the kids alternate between mocking him in class for being a thief, or for having been accused of being a thief, with supporting him against the other (racist) students. There’s no consistency to this, because the same kids who could be supporting him in one breath are mocking him with the next. Carla won’t have any of it, but neither can she be seen to condemn the actions of the other teachers, even when she doesn’t support them.
With one of the other teachers, they’re briefly chatting in another language (Polish), before Carla pulls back and asserts they should be talking in German, out of respect for their German hosts(?) It’s a weird moment, and one that I am pretty sure means something more in context, a context which is unknown to those of us not immersed in German contemporary culture.
It means something, but what? What is it about German conformity that the director is trying to assert, and about how it plays out in the classroom?
I dunno. With the determination to find out who the actual thief is, in order to exonerate Ali, Carla sets up her wallet in her jacket, and a laptop with a camera that records in her absence, in order to see if she can catch someone out. She already suspects that it could be one of the other teachers.
Hell has this road, I’ve heard, leading all the way to it. It’s apparently paved. And it’s not paved with the bones of the damned or the skulls of the gullible, but with Good Intentions.
Every single time Carla tries to do a good or right or honourable thing, it backfires spectacularly. She is referred to by the other teachers, most of whom I’d argue don’t really seem to like her, as either idealistic or an idealist, but I think she’s trying to help.
How much worse it makes everything. The footage recorded on her laptop leads her to suspect someone, but it doesn’t give anyone certainty. The accused is indignant, and storms out of the school, but, this isn’t a plot twist, since we’ve known the whole time, she has a son in Carla’s class, a bright boy called Oskar.
But it’s pointed out to Carla as well that in filming someone without their permission, regardless of what they might have been doing, she might have broken the law herself.
The evidence is not strong. Mostly, it boils down to a shirt, a mostly white shirt or blouse with some golden stars on it.
If you ever watch the flick, tell me that the scene where Carla hallucinates and sees everyone, absolutely everyone walking in a corridor wearing the same shirt doesn’t chill your blood to the bone.
And, compared to that, my gods, once the shit hits the fan, Carla has to host a parent teacher night. When the person that she’s accused of stealing money from her wallet turns up, as is her right, for some reason, and starts trashing her to the other parents, with impunity, with Carla having no way of fighting back, I felt like I would rather have the earth swallow me up to avoid having to watch a single second more of this horrifying encounter.
And it hits Carla hard, but, you know what? She is way tougher than me, than most people. All these indignities, all these ways in which no-one had her back, all these ways in which she takes the high road and the abuse of all and sundry, and yet still tries to do what she thinks is right by Oskar (even after Oskar’s behavior in trying to exonerate his mother becomes violent), being mindful of how all of this could doom Oskar’s future.
She keeps desperately trying to do the “right” thing, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.
At one point when the awful mother is ranting at her, sounding like she doesn’t care about what happens to her son (which I don’t think we’re meant to take as literal, because there is much that is ambiguous all throughout this film; nothing is neat or tidy), Carla yells at her, righteously, that if Oskar fails, both teacher and mother have failed him.
Impossible situations, untenable positions, with no ways out, no exits possible. I don’t know how she keeps going, but she does.
For reasons that would astound anyone watching, and anyone that doesn’t believe or understand where she’s coming from, Carla agrees to be interviewed by the student journalists putting together the school newspaper. She believes in their right to know what’s going on, though she’s limited in what she can tell them, but she can still believe in their right to know the truth, and that the truth will out.
Why is she then surprised when the student journos, in the interests of pursuing the “truth”, trash her in the article, take her statements out of context, and give the accused who’s now doing everything she can to destroy Carla carte blanche (or whatever the German equivalent is) to demonise her?
Why indeed. It must be because she’s not watching the film that we’re watching.
This is a phenomenal film that manages to imbue its subjects and its performances with an incredible amount of tension and pathos. It treats everyone, even and especially the people acting poorly, with understanding and respect. All of the kids get to be open and honest in both their good qualities and in their general shittiness as well; they’re treated with respect without making them precocious or precious. I don’t ultimately care whether the other performances are good or not, they’re all excellent, but it’s the mighty central performance by Leonie Benesch that carries everything. She is amazing. She is a tribute to every teacher across the world that keeps teaching, keeps showing up, keeps going in, keeps trying to get through to the kids, keeps trying to do the best for the people around them, and doesn’t degenerate into a cynical drunk just going through the motions.
I am in awe of people like this, good teachers who keep fighting the good fight no matter how shitty the pay is or how shitty some of the students and many of the other teachers and parents are. The film is saying a lot about German contemporary society, and I’m probably only privy to a fraction of what’s going on, but this is a stunning film all the same, with a lot to see in it.
I haven’t mentioned the cheap technique that the flick uses to really goose the proceedings, and to keep us on tenterhooks throughout: It’s the fucking soundtrack. A lot of the film is taken up with this goddamn anxiety-inducing plucked cello string which is repeated a million times, and which is making me anxious just remembering it. It’s effective, that’s all I’ll say. It’s really fucking effective.
9 times this flick has more tension than all the Jason Bourne and John Wick films put together out of 10
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