On "The Teachers' Lounge"
and Mendelssohn's Overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream
The film "The teacher's lounge" from Germany should own forever Mendelssohn's overture "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Ein Sommernachtstraum). You may stop reading here and watch the film instead. If interested in what my justification is for this claim, then read on...
As many would know, the overture, written by an eighteen-year-old boy at the time, begins with an enchanting, whispery opening of four chords, followed by fleet-footed strings that promise something auspicious in the air. It fully blooms into a bouquet of fragrances and rays of sunshine peeking through leaves, even evoking galloping horses. Later sections follow with allusions to loss accepted and rest promised.
The film is set in a school in Germany, focusing on a class of children overseen by a young woman who is just beginning her teaching career with friends and foes among colleagues. The Mendelssohn piece is the only piece of recognizable music and it appears only at the very end, while the rest of the film employs only occasional tense sound bites.
Formally, its narrative borrows elements from classic detective stories, devoting most of its running time (quite literally!) to layering maladies within this microcosm of our conflicted society. This is depicted through intractable children, politics among teachers and staff, and the serious and watchful parents (in the quintessentially German way). As if reading an Agatha Christie novel, we are encouraged to closely follow all threads, which will surely lead up to the denouement when Hercule Poirot brilliantly clarifies everything and closes the case.
But wait... My worry began when I noticed there were barely ten minutes left before the ending, and the director was still busy knotting the threads. Could there be a Part II?
For almost all of its running time, the film meticulously builds a crisis of untenable intensity, weaving together themes of petty theft, ethnic prejudice, surveillance and privacy issues, and accusations and rumors among the three main groups: children, teachers, and parents. The beauty of the film unfolds in the last two minutes, offering profound clarification on what was most precious and in need of protection all along. The climax doesn't hinge on a dramatic nuclear blast or an extravagant song and dance, but rather on the power of mundane props: a glass of water, a declined cellular call, a Rubik's cube, a lump in the teacher's throat, the first four chords of the overture, a blackout, and images of empty schoolrooms—suddenly purged of all human flaws. The breath-stopping crescendo reaches its relief as the orchestra bursts into a full blast, and the screen shows the dignified procession of a boy seated on a chair, elevated over the shoulders of two German security officers. In this moment, the film's magic is complete.
In that moment, I began to believe that an impossibly tangled jumble could be unraveled through emotive intelligence. With hindsight, we realize that, just like in good detective stories, the seeds of a saving grace for all concerned had been carefully sown throughout—all through the subtle actions and decisions of the teacher, both knowingly and unknowingly.
This was the closest I've ever come to understanding how a 'miracle' might quietly visit like a thief in one's life. Be alert to the first four notes of Mendelssohn that resonate in the story of your life. Look up and gaze into the eyes of the person before you. You might just find yourself in the midst of a miracle quietly unfolding.
Still here? I hope I have adequately persuaded you to watch this film at your earliest convenience and to explore various renditions of the precocious overture conducted by renowned conductors - Beecham (as featured in the film), Klemperer, Maag, Szell, Ozawa, and Abbado, who selected it for his very final concert with the Berlin Philharmonic a few months before his passing.