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You have to hand it to the Germans. Their capacity for self-examination, which often leads to self-condemnation, seems almost limitless, and can lead to inadvertent injustices, as seen by the way the country’s strict definition of antisemitism has recently affected the free speech rights of artists and scholars, even Jewish ones. Several weeks ago, I reviewed the German movie System Crasher, which strongly criticized the social welfare system as it was applied to an extremely violent 9-year-old girl. In similar fashion, this Oscar-nominated public school-set drama, directed by Ilker Çatak, presents what amounts to an insoluble situation and the various ways that those in authority make it even worse, even when the intentions are good. This latter aspect is brought to bear on the protagonist, an idealistic teacher named Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), who is in practically every scene in the movie, even when the POV occasionally shifts slightly. Carla teaches seventh grade, and as the movie begins the faculty is dealing with a series of thefts they believe were carried out by one of the students. Several teachers, adhering to the school’s no-tolerance policy in a very literal sense, have dragged Carla into an interrogation of student class officers to get them to snitch on anyone they suspect of being the culprit. Carla is uncomfortable and tries to object but her objections are over-ridden. When the teachers use the intelligence they squeezed out of their reluctant charges to carry out a search of students’ wallets, it’s clear who they think did it, and the followup investigation into this individual, though it produces no evidence, thoroughly upends Carla’s job, since the boy, the child of Turkish immigrants, is in her class. 

Carla is thus thrust into a situation whose operating principles—find the thief at all costs—clash with her own, and then starts to wonder if the thief really is a student, especially after she sees a fellow teacher steal change from the coffee fund. So she sets a trap for the thief on her own and catches an administrative employee, Ms. Kuhn (Eva Löbau), in the act. Ms. Kuhn, even when presented with evidence, vehemently denies the charge, and all hell breaks loose, because Carla’s method of entrapment entailed a de facto invasion of privacy. However, that isn’t the worst of it. Ms. Kuhn’s son, Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), is Carla’s star pupil, and once rumors spread he decides to give Carla back what she’s wrought, and she becomes not only a suspect herself, but the subject of speculation with regard to her provenance (she’s Polish, not German), her politics, and her mental wherewithal. 

Çatak frames this all as a thriller, with each loop of Carla’s downward spiral telegraphed a few beats before it manifests into something uglier than the previous loop. Just as Carla tries to make “every matter a teachable one,” Çatak exploits every twist and turn in the story as a cautionary device. Moreover, he sets everyone against Carla, both the self-consciously defensive faculty and staff, and the sensitive and highly radicalized (by social media) student body, whose innate adolescent cruelty is exacerbated by their over-zealous sense of “solidarity.” A little of this can go a long way, but Çatak piles it on in ever heavier loads to the point that the viewer’s endurance is stretched beyond a credible limit. The movie becomes almost untenable once Carla is driven to hallucinating and the students’ sneering scorn toward her becomes a leitmotif. And while I appreciated how Çatak didn’t tie things up neatly in the end, his dramatic gamesmanship left me so emotionally drained that I didn’t have the energy to imagine what might happen beyond the last scene; which makes me think that being drained was the whole point.

In German, English and Polish. Opens May 17 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

The Teachers’ Lounge home page in Japanese

photo (c) if…Productions/ZDF/arte MMXXII

In some ways, this movie about reggae legend Bob Marley, which takes in the years 1976-78—after he had already become a superstar—relies on narrative notes that one doesn’t usually find in big budget biopics. It seems more interested in capturing the vibe that gave Marley his distinctive sound and outlook than in cycling through the events of his life. At the same time, it gives short shrift to the historical environment that surrounded him. We see and hear a lot about the political and social strife that forced Marley to leave Jamaica for most of this period after he and his wife are shot by would-be assassins, but almost no explanation of the source of that unrest. Similarly, his popularity is taken for granted, and thus the viewer doesn’t quite understand just how revolutionary an album Exodus was both musically and lyrically, only that he spent an inordinate amount of time trying to sell it to the white music insiders in the UK who wanted him to produce another Natty Dread. The only recognizable through-line is Marley’s marriage, which has its foreseeable ups-and-downs owing to the fact that he and his family had to leave Jamaica (Bob to England, Rita and the kids to Delaware, where her mother lived) and Bob’s serial infidelities and jealousies, but even in that regard the director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, can’t keep his attention focused long enough to make Marley’s connubial life comprehensible.

If the movie retains interest for anyone with more than minimal knowledge of Bob Marley the artist, it’s due to the performances. Kingsley Ben-Adir doesn’t look much like Marley, but he assumes a loose, colloquial manner that feels correct for the themes if not necessarily for the man himself. And Lashana Lynch gives Rita Marley a fiery temperament that suits the rough-and-tumble life she entered into once she moved from backup singer to wife and mother, all the while maintaining a creative partnership with Bob, even if the movie subsequently renders her merely worshipful. The acting sometimes compensates for the raggedy script, which throws incidents at the audience as if they were random clues to a mystery the movie has no intention of solving. Marley’s big tour of Europe is relegated to a hasty, poorly edited montage. The African tour, which in the beginning of the film is presented as a hugely important project, is aborted without so much as a whimper (though he did eventually make it there before he died), thus leaving the One Love Peace Concert, which was supposed to unite all Jamaicans, as the climactic cinematic moment that has to share screen time with Marley dying of cancer, an element that seems almost gratuitously injected into the movie. 

The viewer is occasionally treated to some flashbacks that show how immensely talented Marley was as a teen and his close association with the Wailers, who are treated cursorily despite their own importance as individual musicians. Even Island Records’ Chris Blackwell (James Norton) feels superfluous. A message at the beginning from Marley’s son Ziggy attests to the movie’s “authenticity,” a claim Green struggles to put across with any conviction. 

Opens May 17 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Bob Marley: One Love home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Paramount Pictures

With her debut film, German director Nora Fingscheidt demonstrates unequivocally that she isn’t fooling around. The title is a kind of inside joke among social workers in Germany, as it refers to a case that basically breaks the carefully wrought procedures that have been put in place to address public welfare situations as fairly and compassionately as possible. The case that crashes this system is Benni (Helena Zengel), a blonde 9-year-old girl, constantly dressed in shocking pink, who is prone to explosive fits of rage. Even as the movie starts, the public servants charged with her case are at the end of their ropes because they have run out of foster care facilities that will accept Benni, since she’s already been kicked out of most of them. The ostensible reason for Benni’s distemper is her being separated from her single mother, Bianca (Lisa Hagmeister), who, based on the few times we see her in action, seems constitutionally incapable of handling Benni’s mood swings, as she’s got two other younger children (from different fathers than Benni’s) to care for and a bad dose of low self-esteem that scans as borderline suicidal. Benni is at that age when she may be starting to realize that her mother can’t handle her, but in any event it doesn’t impinge on her virulent sense of abandonment, which always manifests as physical violence.

Mood swings imply that there are high moments, as well, and the film makes it clear that Benni has a native intelligence her case workers can’t quite exploit to their—and her—advantage. One of these workers, Micha (Albrecht Schuch), thinks he has a solution, and brings Benni on a tough love weekend to an isolated cabin where he often works with troubled adolescent boys. At first, Benni objects to the lack of creature comforts—no TV, no Wifi, no electricity, in fact—but she eventually responds positively to Micha’s attention, which is focused completely on her. The problem, of course, is that Micha thinks this form of therapy will somehow change Benni, but once she understands that Micha has his own family to return to and that he is only “doing his job,” she reverts to her core resentments. Micha is thus castigated by his colleagues for violating a signal code of his calling: Always maintain a professional distance. Micha has been indulging in what is called “a rescue fantasy,” and once Benni catches on she pulls back into her sense of being used by adults. 

The question viewers will ask themselves as they endure this punishing movie is, What can be done that hasn’t already been tried? Benni spends several sequences in a psychiatric facility drugged into catatonia, and it’s the only time the film calms down. Having run out of resources and answers, her main case worker, an astoundingly patient woman referred to as Frau Bafane (Gabriela Maria Schmeide), sees no alternative but to send her overseas to a special school where she will be a prisoner, though, truthfully, most of the foster homes we see in the movie practice their own forms of incarceration. The ultimate injury comes when Bianca, after breaking up with her latest boyfriend, agrees to take Benni back and the child is overjoyed, but then Bianca comes to her senses when she realizes her youngest son will somehow take after Benni, as if what Benni suffers from is contagious. (She does have a point, since the boy seems to idolize his half-sister.) System Crasher is unrelenting in its insistence that some people are not made for society, and while the onus falls on the failures of individuals, like Bianca, Fingscheidt does not try to blame the system. She gives these hard-working, well-intentioned people the benefit of the doubt. She just wants them, and us, to try harder. 

In German. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

System Crasher home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 kineo Filmproduktion Peter Harwig, Weydemann Bros. GmbH, Oma Inge Film UG (haftungsbeschränkt), ZDF