THE TEACHERS' LOUNGE (B+) - Writer-direct Ilker Catak spins a fascinating story about small-stakes accusations and misunderstandings that consume a new teacher and the middle school staff and students around her. It's a small but compelling film that's tough to look away from.
Much of that comes from the star, Leonie Benesch, who plays the cool, caring Carla Nowak, an immigrant to Germany battling some cultural prejudices involving her and her students of color. The film begins with the administration's interrogation of Carla's seventh-grade class after a Turkish boy is seen carrying an unusual amount of money. Carla shows sympathy to her students and to the boy when his parents are called in for a tense conference with administrators.
It turns out another bright student, Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), grabs the teacher's sympathies, especially after Carla, through surreptitious video surveillance from her laptop, apparently catches Oskar's mother, a staffer, of stealing in the teachers' lounge (she's not the only one nicking things). The mother is sent home on admin leave, and Oskar becomes a sort of folk hero among students. (The supporting cast of students is another asset, especially the rebellious student-newspaper staffers.) Carla's group conference with parents brims with tension.
Catak, writing the script with Johannes Duncker, has a compelling message to convey about "outsiders" and the passive-aggressive ways that closed social systems manipulate the truth and create sparring factions. At only a few ticks past 90 minutes, the film unspools its story methodically, showing a subtle transformation in Carla as she learns to navigate her new environment. (In a telling scene, she insist that a fellow Polish teacher speak German in the teachers' lounge.) The ending is heartfelt, with a whimsical final shot that suggests the dangers and rewards of bucking the system.
BONUS TRACK: Life Is Short
Screenings don't get more timely than "Mountains," a minor-key mini-drama about an immigrant couple getting by in Miami's Little Haiti community. If only this debut film had a little more chicken meat on its bones. Xavier and Esperance are a sweet couple, but the monotony of their days eking out a living in a gentrifying neighborhood is too often as dull as plain white rice.
You can tell their neighborhood is gentrifying not only by the "We buy houses" door-hangers but also by the presence of an improv theater. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) works on home-demolition sites, and Esperance (Sheila Anozier) earns money as a crossing guard when she's not at home cooking and sewing. Surrounded by increasing affluence, Xavier spots a nice house that's bigger than their rundown one-bathroom place, seeing an opportunity to move up on the social ladder. Their son, Junior (Chris Renois) a college-dropout is a typical Americanized young man who has little patience for his parents' boring traditional lifestyle.
We find out halfway through that Junior is honing a standup act at the improv theater. Director Monica Sorelle gives us little to glom onto narratively in the first half -- how many times can we watch Xavier clear debris (to make way for McMansions) or dutifully eat his lunch out of Tupperware. Nazaire has a Mike Tyson roughness and gruffness to him, but there is no real dimension to this stereotypically noble blue-collar man. Junior's standup set, about five minutes, shakes the film out of its stupor. But I just didn't have it in me to return to the worksite and find out if Xavier and Esperance get the chance to rise in the wake of the gentrifiers. Sorelle has crafted a sweet, quiet slice of life that floats in Haitian culture, but she needed more of a hook to hang a feature on.
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