Luis Martinez

Updated Thursday, February 1, 2024-21:35

  • Review The Promised Land (The Bastard): Of the declassed and noble (****)

  • Review Poor Creatures: An exuberant, controversial and hypnotic feminist apology that goes boom (*****)

  • Review The area of ​​interest: A masterpiece built at the foot of the abyss (*****)

  • Interview Ilker Çatak, director of 'Teachers' Room': "If education is privatized, goodbye to democracy"

A nice exercise to test the resistance capacity of our neurons and each of our kindest and most beloved prejudices is a double program with

'Those Who Remain

', by Alexander Payne, and '

Teachers' Room

', by Ilker Çatak. Both are on the bill and both are present at the Oscars. On the side of the first, there is the epic of the teachers that we would always have liked to have: curmudgeonly, but understanding; tough at the same time as disproportionately empathetic (whatever the latter means). Humanism, in its vaguest and even childish definition, makes sense in the magnificent interpretation of Paul Giamatti, faithful heir to Robin Williams in

'Dead Poets Society'

or Sidney Poitier in '

Rebellion in the Classrooms'

. In the case of the second, there is no possible reference. Maybe, just maybe,

'The White Ribbon'

, by Michael Haneke, but only if we want to be cruel with comparisons.

How is it possible that two such radically different films deal with the same thing?

And there, in the contradiction and astonishment, the genius of a proposal that, definitively, turns around a genre that is always so attractive, so beautiful and always, let's face it, so tricky.

'Teachers' Room'

is not, strictly speaking, the film we expect to see in a high school. And that, for the simple fact of being like that (or not being like that, the better), is already an achievement. The story is told of a novice teacher determined to do things well. She sings with her students, she loves them, she holds his hand... And her effort is so great and so clear that, in fact, everything goes wrong. A theft in the classroom leads, as always, to suspicion of the supposedly weaker or, why not, the obviously more different.

Racism, they call it.

As befits a teacher with firm moral convictions, her task from now on will be to clarify what happened at any cost. Although that leads him to discuss the center's rules, break protocols and confront her peers. Her conviction is such that she will even design a trap at her expense and at great risk to capture the real culprit red-handed. Big mistake.

From here on, there is neither education nor rest.

Çatak manages to lead the viewer through exactly the same guilty agony of the protagonist.

The film's strategy is to break down each of the audience's expectations one by one in the same way that those of the teacher played with due nerve by Leonie Benesch (by the way, in the cast of 'The

White Ribbon'

) fail.

Very accurate and very out of character. The camera pursues our heroine in her very out-of-tune desperation while the square format of the screen and the brilliant and strident soundtrack signed by Marvin Miller turn the so-called cinematic-educational experience into the closest thing to a nightmare.

The film recycles the language of the school drama (let's call it that) into a kind of claustrophobic '

thriller

' with admirable precision and stress. It is not about composing one of those wild and pessimistic tragedies that those nostalgic for cave pedagogy so love. Nor is the idea to tear one's clothes for the lost authority of the ruling class (that is, teachers). The idea is much more complex and finer.

'Teachers' Room'

succeeds in transferring all the conflicts of a society in permanent conflict (or just polarized, as they say about ours) to the primal place of doubts, uncertainties and, also, infinite possibilities. Suddenly, all the cultural fights, all the crises and all our most intimate mistakes are transparently conjured up in a kind of

fable without a moral,

without a solution and without condescension. Brilliant that ending split in two.

As I said, few double programs are as revealing. How ridiculous and banal Alexander Payne's proposal suddenly seems!

--

Director

: Ilker Çatak.

Performers

: Leonie Benesch, Eva Löbau, Leonard Stettnisch, Michael Klammer.

Duration

: 96 minutes.

Nationality

: Germany.