LUIS MARTINEZ Madrid
Madrid
Updated Thursday, February 1, 2024-00:43
Review of The Three Musketeers. Milady: The Olympic and mysterious majesty of Eva Green (***)
Rodeo Review: Motomami is a state of mind (****)
Review Poor Creatures: An exuberant, controversial and hypnotic feminist apology that goes boom (*****)
It's ugly to start at the end (especially if it's a movie), but on certain occasions there is no other choice.
Teacher's Room
, by the German
Ilker Çatak
, is one of those cases. The film that competes as an international film at both the Goya Awards and the Oscars (where it rivals
The Snow Society,
by Juan Antonio Bayona) just ends and begins again. He does it in the mind of the viewer who, during the little more than an hour and a half that the film lasts, has been led through a labyrinth in which nothing ends up being exactly what it seems. The alleged culprits have the face of innocence and those who, by appearance and even profession, are even condemned by staying away from any crime, accusation or misdemeanor are overtaken by the shadow of suspicion. «I remember», comments the director, «that someone told me that admitting that the protagonist may be guilty is the equivalent of admitting your own guilt. And I liked it as a summary. The movie ends, we said, and we return exactly to the beginning, when we entered the cinema believing ourselves to be innocent. And not.
To situate ourselves,
Teacher's Room
tells the story of a young high school mathematics teacher, idealistic and convinced of the clarity of her job. Suddenly, a series of robberies abruptly interrupt the daily tranquility of the institute. One of the students, from an emigrant family to be exact, is identified as responsible. She decides to get to the bottom of the matter on her own. She prepares a trap for the supposed thief by leaving her own purse with money as a decoy in front of a hidden computer camera. The images point to another possible thief. But there are no certainties. And that is when accusations that are not entirely founded arrive, when prejudices always seem unfounded and when the structures of the school system do not appear as effective as they should. That's when it all starts.
«Actually, I'm not sure that my film is about education. What interested me was to investigate the question of truth, its changing and problematic status in a world like ours taken over by fake news. We have seen it in the pandemic on the issue of vaccines and we have seen it spectacularly in the United States. If we add to all this the increasingly relevant role of Artificial Intelligence, we can deduce that our future depends on knowing clearly what truth is. It depends on whether we agree on what type of society we want. Alternative facts have undermined the most basic possibility of consensus, of understanding, of common desire...
Even education has become problematic. How do we have to educate?
».
So, your film does deal a bit with education...Yes, without a doubt. Of education and privileges and emigration. I will give you my personal example. My grandfather and grandmother came to Germany from a very disadvantaged position. My father was barely eight years old. They arrived, worked in the factories, learned to read and write in German and were able to give my father an education. I was born in the 80s and I am what I am (son of working class immigrants who I am talking to you about the film I have shot) thanks to the German educational system. My grandfather was a farmer and I represent Germany at the Hollywood Oscars.
Çatak says that he does not understand the rejection of emigration that is spreading like wildfire throughout Europe. He says it, furthermore, without hiding his indignation in the first person. Let's say that now the film is put aside. «I see through Instagram that the extreme right in my country endorses Germany's success at the Oscars [of the five candidates, in addition to their own, the British one,
The Zone of Interest
, is spoken in German, and the Japanese one,
Perfect Days
, directed by German Wim Wenders] and I can't believe it. If I win, my dedication will be for them:
"This is for you, assholes,"
he says outright after accusing politicians of being opportunists: "They sense that they can make a profit out of saying that immigration is bad, even though few countries have benefited from it as much as Germany, and make fear their flag. "They live by creating fear."
Be that as it may, and beyond the truth as a general theme and immigration as a very personal matter, Teachers' Room portrays, even if only as a setting and almost as another character, the German educational system. And there you can see, or sense, part of its shortcomings and, of course, its achievements. «In my country,
right now there are 25,000 teachers missing.
Nobody wants to do a job that demands a lot and is very poorly paid. To prepare the film, I visited countless institutes and they all said the same thing. They lack teachers. Many subjects are taught by substitutes on an overtime basis. "That has to change." Pause. «We have to be aware that the only way to a just society is quality public education. Until now that was an unquestioned truth in my country. And, in fact, that is seen in the film. "There are all kinds of social classes."
In Spain, the public system coexists with the private and the concerted system. What do you think? At the moment when education is sold and privatized, the privileged are authorized to increase their privileges and the disadvantaged are condemned. If education is privatized, goodbye to democracy. The peculiar thing is that this was one of those consensuses that is being lost when discussing the very concept of truth with all kinds of false or alternative facts.
Teacher's Room
runs across the screen in a square format that encloses the viewer's gaze in precisely "the isolation of the protagonist." And so, in a kind of claustrophobic nightmare, it leads the viewer towards an ending split in two in which there is no resolution other than that which burns. It's all doubts. Nothing is what it seems.
«Human beings are inexplicable.
There are not only guilty and innocent. "If someone like us is capable of committing a crime, some of that guilt is also ours." The end is the beginning.