What is the best experience a movie can offer? Excitement? Entertainment? Catharsis? Sure. But there is one aspect in which movies can go farther and be more effective than any other art form. That is identification with the characters. More than novels or theatre plays, movies can make you feel like you are in the shoes of its lead. Like you are an LA detective solving murders and dealing with double-crossing dames in the sweltering heat. Like you are a hurt lover pining for the woman of your dreams. Like you are a father mourning the death of your child in the bizarre labyrinths of Venice. Books can perhaps EXPLAIN a character better, delve deeper into their motivations and emotions, but only movies can bring their experiences, the atmospheres of the places they frequent, the sounds of the world that surrounds them to such tangible life.
That is why admire most those movies which make me not only understand a character but feel like I've spent two hours in his life. I remember vividly watching the 2008 Laurent Cantet film "The Class" and walking out of it feeling like I'd spent two hours as a teacher in a French public school. I had a similarly visceral reaction to Alan Clarke's brilliant "The Firm" which has a fight scene so real, so alive, so brutal, so sparkling with energy that I have to pause the film to catch my breath whenever I watch it. Most recently, I was left breathless after Jasmila Zbanic's excellent "Quo Vadis, Aida" after which I felt like I'd run for 90 minutes alongside its title character.
Now, a year after Zbanic's film comes a Croatian movie that achieves the same heady results. It is the greatly impressive and promising debut of Sonja Tarokic entitled "The Staff Room". It follows the first few months at work of a young and idealistic school counsellor who arrives at a crusty, small Croatian school with great ideas and energy for change. Her name is Anamarija (Marina Redzepovic), one word, and she soon incurs the ire of her co-workers though she's not yet sure why. After all, she's only trying to make their school a better place.
She first clumsily comes between an ego battle between the drama teacher and the creative writing teacher who objects to his school play being rewritten. She makes friends with a couple of female teachers but their relationship becomes frosty after Anamarija tries to intervene on behalf of a troubled kid. Funnily enough, in the end, her only friend in the school seems to be Sinisa (Stojan Matavulj), a paranoid history teacher whom she repeatedly tries to get fired. All of this brings her into open conflict with the school's headmistress (Nives Ivankovic), a vain and manipulative woman with a penchant for melodramatic shouting and a fear of any form of scandal. She tries (and mostly succeeds) to sweep every irregularity under the rug where she intends to keep them until the next school election is over.
Caught between the teachers' ego trips, jealousies, vanities, office politics, and old-fashioned laziness, Anamarija's confidence and idealism shake and disintegrate until she slowly starts becoming as loony as the teachers around her. She spends the entirety of the film's 2 hours running from one incident to another, trying to keep a cool head, struggling and failing to reach satisfactory conclusions for everyone. The film is a tiring, emotional experience and I went along for the ride with her.
Channelling the kinetic energy of the school environment, the editing is appropriately choppy and lively. The sound design is decidedly Altmanesque and the buzzing noise of dozens of conversations happening at the same time underscores pretty much every scene. Every shot in the film is buzzing with life. It is a dazzling display of talented filmmaking from Tarokic who continually makes unusually brave choices for a first-time filmmaker. For one, the film has no obvious genre distinctions. It is at times hilarious, at times sad, frequently infuriating. It has no stars, no obvious selling points. It has no through-plot to speak of. Another brave and effective choice is the film's soundtrack which is comprised entirely of folk music which is in direct dissonance to the setting and time the film takes place in. And yet it works perfectly. It serves to both underscore the universality of the events happening on screen and to remind us of the songs we sang and listened to when we were at school. Anyone who sang or listened to the school choir will remember some of this music.
Like "Quo Vadis, Aida" before it, "The Staff Room" relies on a strong leading lady and the film has one in the form of Marina Redzepovic. Unlike Jasna Djuricic, however, Redzepovic plays someone who is more of an observer, a kind of guide to the world of the school. Anamarija serves as kind of like Martin Sheen if we equate the school to the Vietnam jungle (a comparison which is actually not too far from the truth). Redzepovic is superb in the role and wrestles successfully with Anamarija's conflicting instincts. On the one hand, she wants to do the right thing and fight for justice and improvement. On the other hand, however, she wants to keep her job and to do that she must strike an uneasy peace with some rather distasteful people. Compromise is at the heart of her job even though she clearly doesn't feel quite at home with it.
The rest of the cast is equally excellent and the casting choices are one of the film's shining qualities. Every single actor looks the part down to the slightest detail. The haircut of the crusty history teacher, the long face of the head of the parents' council, the cheap bracelets worn by the teachers... All of the archetypes who work at a school are carried over into the film with staggering accuracy and vividness. I feel like I've met all of these people and I could swear some of them taught me at school.
"The Staff Room" is not the sleekest or most flawless film of the year. For one, it should have definitely been shorter. At 2 hours, it is a little overwhelming, especially since it so perfectly evokes the hectic nature of a school. Another complaint would also be a lack of school kids in the film. Even though they are discussed they are never appropriately embodied. I also frequently found myself confused or uninformed as to the events happening on screen and having to play catch-up due to the film's lightning-fast pace. I attribute this to directorial inexperience.
And yet, "The Staff Room" is undeniably my favourite film of the year shoulder to shoulder with Denis Villeneuve's "Dune". A strange pairing you might think, but both of these films made me genuinely feel like I spent time in the worlds they are describing. Both of them made me feel like I walked in their characters' shoes. They didn't merely tell me a story, they made me a part of it. And just like I sweated on the surface of Arrakis, I found myself arguing with teachers and being infuriated by the schoolmistress of a Zagreb elementary school. For the 2 hour duration of "The Staff Room", I found myself caring more about the events in this fictional school than about anything else in my life. That level of identification and immersion can only be achieved by a truly great film.
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