German representative in the Oscar race for the best international film (against The Area of Interest or The Snow Circle to name but a few), The Teachers' Hall Comes out this week in France. The opportunity to return to a film that causes a lot of ink to flow...
Facho school?
Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch, already seen in The white ribbon In particular, Haneke) is a teacher in a German gymnasium shaken by a history of recurrent flights. As teachers organize themselves to remove the evil, a "zero tolerance" policy is decreed in the school. A heavy climate of suspicion will then cover the classes of this school on the edge of implosion.
The director Ilker Çatak offers a suffocating dive into a totalitarian virant school, which is reminiscent of another German film work: Die Welle (The Wave). Even plunged into the student community, even choosing the thriller to represent it, even wanting to evoke the fascisation of a hierarchical system. The school seems to be the perfect soil to explore this notion of insidious domination by playing the role of sample-test of dominating logic. School, at the heart of a reactionary project? We have a right to ask ourselves, and the recent video of Honorary Words bearing this title proves whether it is necessary the relevance and topicality of this question...
From Thriller to Baldness
To represent this, Ilker Çatak makes the choice of a conventional thriller staging, not to say purely functional. The photograph is dull, greyish, the ubiquitous music ends up crushing the scenes, the montage rhythmic with the field/against-field as a standard plane. In short, nothing new under the sun on this side, even if it is necessary to recognize the effectiveness of the device: in a handful of plans, the director makes understand his main issue (the climate of suspicion caused by an increase in the number of flights in the establishment), and pushes his spectator within a spiral of an hour and a half haletante from end to end.
Yet we are soon beginning to understand that the director is not there to tell us a simple chronicle of a college, as the Palme d'or had eminently done. Between the walls For example. In his thriller, he places one by one the pawns of a more global discourse on the insidious establishment of a totalitarian system by the prism of his school environment...
Unfortunately, the metaphor is crude. The lines drawn are bold. The speech constantly highlighted. And the film that was so far a conventional but effective thriller finds itself overburdened with a slender subtext, constantly overexplicited to an end a little too lean to be honest. Worse, the parallels drawn with the role of the press disgust even a dubious, mismanaged or even reactionary speech, which one would gladly have done.
Anyway, The Teachers' Hall Maybe we could have stayed there. We have done much better to explore the contingencies of oppression linked to a climate of delation, we have done more subtle in the film exploration of the dreads of school life, we have done less bald as thriller to thesis. Surprised of all this a film-tension taking perfectly served by its actors, but which struggles to convince by its sole purpose.
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