Review: The Teachers' Lounge (2023) and September 5 (2024)

The Teachers’ Lounge (2023)
Co-written and directed by Ilker Çatak
Co-written by Johannes Duncker

September 5 (2024)
Directed by Tim Fehlbaum

These are two very different movies. In one, a teacher in a German public school struggles against a strong-willed twelve-year-old. In the other, an American sports television crew finds itself in the middle of a terror attack. Both are set in Germany, and both are quiet, tense dramas. And both star a German actress, Leonie Benesch.

“The Teachers’ Lounge,” directed by Ilker Çatak, is set in a German school where everyone should be getting along quite well, but there’s a fly in the soup. Someone is taking small sums of money from the purses and wallets of the school’s teachers, who leave their coats and purses in the teachers’ lounge while they’re in class. At first, a Turkish-German boy, a slow student named Oskar, is unfairly blamed. His teacher, Carla (Benesch), saw him in the teachers’ lounge, where he wasn’t supposed to be, but after he’s sent home he is dragged back by his father, who protests that there is no proof the boy was guilty of the theft of a few Euros from Carla’s purse. Oskar returns to the class, but he wasn’t well integrated with the other students in the first place, and the accusation is enough to push him into the role of outcast.

Then Carla secretly sets a camera to record the goings-on in the teachers’ lounge, and catches the thief in the act — not Oskar, but a middle-aged school secretary who also happens to be Oskar’s mother. Carla shows the video to the principal, who wrings her hands in frustration. Taking secret videos is illegal, the principal points out — at this point I wondered whether the film was set in a town that was part of the former East Germany, but there’s no way for an American reviewer to tell — and having accused Oskar without proof, the school can hardly accuse his mother based on illegally obtained evidence.

Now the other teachers begin to look askance at Carla. She’s new to the school, and the cozy, existing staff, already ruffled by the thefts, look at Carla like she’s the problem. Meanwhile discipline in her classroom falls apart as the other kids begin to bully Oskar and Carla, feeling guilty about the whole thing, stresses out.

The film is really unlike any other I’ve seen. It’s a compelling, nail-biting thriller set in an unaccustomed environment and concerned with issues of finely illuminated ethics, conscience, and social policy.

“September 5” is another unusual thriller. Based on (and using archival footage from) the historical terrorist attack by an Arab gang on the Israeli team at the 1968 summer Olympics in Munich — the fact that the Olympic Village is “only nine miles away” from the site of the Dauchau concentration camp seems relevant to the American TV crew and reporters who are there to cover the sports events for ABC-TV — it’s about how the sports journalists aggressively tackle the news story that has fallen into their laps.

John Magaro — an increasingly visible actor recently seen in “Past Lives” and in “LaRoy, Texas” — stars as Geoff Mason, a relatively inexperienced director who is left in charge on a slow day as the network’s A-team takes a day off. No sooner have the more experienced staff left for a day trip in the Alps than gunfire breaks out in the athletes’ village adjacent to the television center. ABC’s legendary producer Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), founder of Monday Night Football and one of the great historical figures in sports television, makes a decision that the ABC Sports crew there to cover the games will stay in charge of the coverage. The resulting broadcasts were the first live coverage of a terrorist incident.

Benesch has a featured role as a German translator attached to the broadcasters who takes a pivotal role in the subsequent effort to cover the terrorist attack and the ham-handed efforts of the German police to counter it. Her character Marianne is the most important character that is fictional, and as such, she’s used as the linchpin of the story. Almost over-used, in fact — as the only person among the dozens of ABC staffers brought to Munich to provide coverage of the games who is fluent in German and English (which seems like bad planning on the part of the Americans), she keeps track of German news coverage, a police scanner, and the biographies of the Israeli athletes, then is dispatched as a roving reporter to the airport where the hostage crisis tragically ends.

One of the intriguing elements of this tightly scripted and focused feature is its fidelity to not only the actual events but to the technology used to broadcast them. The filmmakers found archival equipment from the late 1960s in museums and the dusty back rooms of television stations and refurbished it, and it provides authenticity to the depiction of historical events. Similarly, actual footage from the coverage is mixed in so well with filmed scenes that the viewer can’t tell the difference; in fact, the network’s sports anchor Jim McKay is seen only in the actual footage from the broadcasts.

Keep an eye on these two actors, Benesch and Maguro.

“The Teachers’ Lounge,” nominated in 2023 for an Oscar for Best International Feature, is on Mubi. “September 5” is on MGM+.