Tag: Leonie Benesch

September 5 (2024)

Well-made reconstruction of a seminal moment, that avoids all the awkward questions it raises

Director: Tim Fehlbaum

Cast: Peter Sarsgaard (Roone Arledge), John Magaro (Geoffrey Mason), Ben Chaplin (Marvin Bader), Leonie Benesch (Marianne Gebhardt), Zinedine Soualem (Jacques Lesgards), Georgina Rich (Gladys Deist), Corey Johnson (Hank Hanson), Marcus Rutherford (Carter Jeffrey), Daniel Adeosun (Gary Slaughter), Benjamin Walker (Peter Jennings)

There is only one thing we really remember about the 1972 Munich Olympics. This celebration of sport, meant to mark Germany’s re-emergence from the shadow of the Holocaust, saw 11 members of the Israeli Olympics team taken hostage and murdered by Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group. The entire kidnapping played out on international TV, the inadequacy of the German police response cripplingly obvious to millions of viewers around the world. September 5 focuses on the ABC Sports team that switched from covering Mark Spitz to one of the first primetime terrorist acts.

Journalists in films tend to either be heroic strivers after truth or scum-bag bin-searchers. September 5 is very much in the first camp, chronicling with documentary precision the professionalism and dedication involved in bringing this story to the world. The story is as terribly involving as the dreadful events it covers on fuzzy long-distance footage. But September 5 struggles when it tries to capture why it’s telling a story that has already been expertly told before (not least in Kevin MacDonald’s superb Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September). What point is September 5 trying to make, either about media or terrorism? It’s not clear to me.

Fehlbaum’s film is as expertly assembled as the swiftly cut-together sports action the team excelled at. The production and sound design faultlessly bring to life the atmosphere of a claustrophobic TV control room. It has a loving eye for the detail of how 70s television was made – you’ve got to admire the practical details of how live coverage was water-marked, clunky cameras were wheeled into position, squabbles were carried out over limited satellite windows and on-the-hoof re-wiring was made to hook up journalists on phones for live broadcast. A parade of strong actors deliver clipped professionalism and anxious strain – Sarsgaard, Magaro, Chaplin and Benesch are all great.

But it fumbles when it addresses the moral issues. Fundamentally, September 5 doesn’t know how to handle the complex ethical balance journalism straddles, between covering events like this and giving the terrorists exactly what they want. After all, as it’s pointed out, there’s a reason Black September targeted the most public event in the world (and why they made demands they surely knew Israel would never accept). They wanted mass coverage: and ABC gave it to them. By September 6, the whole world knew what Palestine was: it’s striking how many of the ABC crew are unfamiliar not only with the sort of fundamentals even a child today knows about the Middle East conflict but how some of them even have to double-check what exactly the word “terrorism” means.

On top of that, the extended media coverage, in some ways, even helped the terrorists. Not least their ability to switch on the TVs in their captured rooms in the Olympic Village and watch live footage of the Munich police’s ham-fisted preparations to storm the building. There is chilling realisation in the control room that the terrorists are also watching their coverage, but the debate about what to do in response to this is light. In fact, much of the conclusion is that the inept German police (who eventually burst into the control room, pointing machine guns wildly, demanding the feed is cut) are really to blame since they forgot to cut the building’s power.

Either way, September 5 doesn’t question the fact that the ABC team encouraged journalist Peter Jennings to remain hidden in the village so he could carry on phoning in live updates, or that they forged an ID for a junior member of the team so could pass as a US athlete and smuggle camera footage in and out of the park. Or that they tune into a police scanner to follow and report on the Munich police’s plans. It also skirts questions of ratings – a clear motivation to keep the cameras rolling – and how this meant ABC had an awkward intention overlap with Black September.

There is no question though that the crew care deeply about the athlete’s fate. Ben Chaplin’s character (an American Jew, who lost family in the Holocaust) goes farthest in constantly reminding the team they are covering the fates of real people here, urging restraint in the coverage. September 5 skirts overt commentary on the Middle East, but raises interesting questions over the characters’ (all of them old enough to remember World War Two) perceptions of Germany and the lingering guilt of that nation (very well captured by Leonie Benesch’s awkward translator).

But when given (false) confirmation that the attempt to free the hostages at the airport has succeeded, it’s the temptation of a scoop that sends the news out on the air. (This moment of mistaken celebration allows September 5 to squeeze in its moments of congratulation for the team’s excellent job before the tragic ending.) Sure, the characters look sickened when they realise their mistake – but does the fact they were given false information really matter more than the fact their motivation was because they wanted to break the story first?

September 5 never really explores these moral questions. It settles for stating them – as Benesch’s character does, describing how she and other reporters hustled at the airport for a scoop, while people literally died a few kms away. It ends with a confusing series of captions, stating this was the first time a terrorist attack was broadcast live and 900 million people watched. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the 900 million figure is being used to celebrate the coverage, rather than reflecting on the fact it taught terrorist groups large scale actions capture attention.

September 5 is on the brink of making a more interesting point, that this was a turning point where getting the story out was more important than the implications of telling the story: that transmitting sensitive information or being too quick to broadcast major headlines was the first stride on a slippery slope that led to the generally awful state of the media today. It’s not a point September 5 is interested in making.

Don’t get me wrong. The Black September attack was an atrocity and ABC’s coverage of its was expert journalism. But you can also argue it shows how journalists can disconnect what they are doing from its real-world impact. But September 5 is silent on how Black September’s success in turning their cause into international news. Or that, thanks it changed the playbooks of terrorist organisations all over the world. None of these interesting, but challenging, ideas get any airtime in this well-made reconstruction.

The Teacher’s Lounge (2023)

A series of minor thefts leads to a school spiralling out of control in this intense, small-scale drama

Director: Ilker Çatak

Cast: Leonie Benesch (Carla Nowak), Eva Löbau (Friederike Kuhn), Anne-Kathrin Gummich (Dr. Bettina Böhm), Rafael Stachowiak (Milosz Dudek), Michael Klammer (Thomas Liebenwerda), Kathrin Wehlisch (Lore Semnik), Leonard Stettnisch (Oskar Kuhn)

Schools can be like whole societies in microcosm, with attention grabbing events having earth-shattering consequences in these tiny worlds. New teacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) finds this out the hard way when she takes matters into her own hands to solve a spate of petty thefts in the staff room, before the blame is pinned on students. Setting a trap, to her surprise she captures on film evidence that the thief is the school’s popular administrator Mrs Kuhn (Eva Löbau), mother of Carla’s star-pupil Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch). Events quickly spiral out of control, as Mrs Kuhn denies the charges and Carla’s attempts to be even-handed and fair leave her isolated at the centre of a storm pitting teachers, students and parents against each other.

The Teachers Lounge is a gripping ‘everyday’ thriller, where events on a small scale capture wider conflicts that rock whole societies. The events themselves seem small – petty theft and arguments over invasions of privacy – but Çatak’s film demonstrates they have shattering impacts on those involved. Loss of reputation, of jobs, the damaging impact on a promising child’s education, the shattering of harmony in a small community – it all explodes due to a few spur-of-the-moment decisions, building on each other so delicately that you are suddenly surprised to find it’s a crisis.

What’s really painful about The Teacher’s Lounge is how scrupulously honest and moral everything Carla tries to do is. What she’s not prepared for, is other people not playing by the same rules. Privately confronting Mrs Kuhn (having caught her distinctive blouse going on camera) with an offer to stop stealing and she’ll say no more about it, she’s amazed and totally shaken by the complete unwillingness to admit any guilt. When the matter is raised with the headmaster, Carla is dumbfounded by Kuhn’s aggressive denial and furious counter-accusation of invasion of privacy. Her cause is passionately taken up by Oskar, accusing Carla of ruining his mother’s life for no reason.

At the film’s heart is a wonderful performance of repressed tension from Leonie Benesch. Carla is a good teacher, but also a slightly distant, perhaps little-too-professional person. She engages more comfortably with the children because the ‘rules’ are clearer. With her fellow teachers, she never seems relaxed. She isn’t willing, as they are, to support (or cover up) for colleagues regardless of the situation. She judges each situation on its own merits – and Benesch superbly shows through her tense frame and strained voice how stressful this is – and adjusts her views and opinions as the situation develops. To everyone else this isn’t a positive but a huge negative, her refusal to follow an agreed line a sign of her flaky lack of loyalty to the team. (Her controversial filming is entirely caused by her mistrust of her colleagues, after watching one of them shamelessly empty an honesty box).

Çatak’s film shows how fragile the rules holding society together can be under pressure. Carla’s compassionate, thoughtful teaching focuses on developing her young students’ empathy and morality. She respects their views and asks for honesty in return. When arguments arise in class, she encourages discussion and consensus building. A jolly welcoming clapping-and-singing routine she practices every morning is about bringing the class together as a group. All of this flies out of the window as events unfold, showing how fragile these precious democratic conventions are.

The control of the teachers in the school turns out to be unbelievably fragile. Carla’s students stop co-operating with her lessons, effectively forming a union. The school newspaper – older students full of idolism about being the next Woodward and Bernstein – trap Carla into a Gotcha interview and misrepresent her opinions, fuelling the crisis (and leading to a near mutiny over a ban of the school newspaper). Carla, naturally, is blamed by her colleagues for the interview.

These fragilities and small-scale repression is just one way Çatak uses the setting to illustrate larger issues. Just under the school’s surface, there is a strong ‘us-and-them’ atmosphere. Both teachers and students demand internal loyalty to their sides. The thefts have already motivated heavy-handed members of staff to pressure (in private meetings) students to inform on their classmates. Carla objects to this but lacks the strength to end it – just as she later objects but does not obstruct a forced search of the boy’s wallets for stolen cash. It becomes more and more clear that Carla’s more considerate, diplomatic way of proceeding simply hasn’t got a chance of getting heard.

There is an uncomfortable air of casual assumptions being swiftly made. The first student suspect is the son of Turkish immigrants (the father’s job as a taxi driver all but used as evidence that the boy is likely guilty). Some of the staff simply can’t believe a boy from his background could have ready cash on him. An unbearably uncomfortable meeting with his parents – who at one point are instructed to speak German – is rife with tension. No wonder Carla is so uncomfortable with her Polish roots being discussed, that she asks a colleague with a similar background to only speak to her in German. Of course that contributes even more to the untrusted sense of distance Carla accidentally gives off to her fellow teachers.

This makes it even more heartbreaking to see Carla’s world slowly collapse in on itself as her attempts to treat everyone’s view points and demands fairly and equally ends with her attacked by both her colleagues and students. With her ever tense, bewildered decency getting ever more crushed Leonie Benesch is excellent in Çatak’s wonderful small-scale morality tale about society today, where the loudest and most strident voices win out. If you were her, you’d be finding an excuse to scream in a classroom as well.

The White Ribbon (2009)

The kids are not all right in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Director: Michael Haneke

Cast: Christian Friedel (Teacher), Ernst Jacobi (Narrator), Burghart Klaußner (Pastor), Steffi Kühnert (Pastor’s wife), Rainer Bock (Doctor), Susanne Lothar (Midwife), Roane Duran (Anna), Leonie Benesch (Eva), Ulrich Tukur (Baron), Ursina Lardi (Baroness), Maria-Victoria Dragus (Klara), Leonard Proxauf (Martin), Josef Bierbichler (Baron’s steward)

I think it’s fair to say Michael Haneke has a mixed view of humanity. His films look at the dark side of human nature, and the hypocrisies and cruelty underpinning much of our society. The White Ribbon explores these ideas further, a parable focusing on a small German village in the months before World War One, looking at how the life in one village perhaps helped lay the moral and societal groundwork for the younger generation to grow up and embrace Nazism.

In the fictional village of Eichwald, tradition is strong. The town, and its morals, are governed by traditional authority figures. However, each of these figures fails to live up to the values they – often brutally – enforce on the village and, most especially, its children. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) is a distant autocrat, who talks of a duty of care but treats the villagers like property. The pastor (Burghart Klaußner) preaches morality and abstinence, but bullies his (many) children and condemns utterly even the slightest deviation from his own rules. The doctor (Rainer Bock) is a studious clinician, who humiliates and devalues his lover, the town’s midwife (Susanne Lothar), and sexually abuses his teenage daughter Anna (Roane Duran). In late 1913, a series of unexplained and increasingly violent events occur, from an attempt to cripple the doctor to arson, kidnap, theft and the beating of the midwife’s handicapped son. The perpetrators remain a mystery – one which the decent but ineffectual teacher (Christian Friedel) attempts to uncover – his older self (Ernst Jacobi) providing an, at times, naïve narration.

Haneke’s aim is to explore the conditions that led a generation to embrace a regime that promotes the unthinkable. While it’s clear that a future of Hitler and fascism – neither mentioned once in the film – hover over everything, this parable could serve for any totalitarian regime. Haneke is not interested in specifics. What fascinates the director is the creation of a mind-set that enables people to willingly align themselves with horrific actions. The brilliance of The White Ribbon is that could be as easily applied to Stalinism and the Khmer Rouge as it can to Nazism.

Shot in a beautiful black-and-white, the film presents a series of striking images, imbued with an immense psychological depth and haunting sense of dread. Haneke’s mastery of visual imagery is sublime, and he paces the film perfectly. While it is easy to claim the film is slow – and it does take its time – the deliberation of the pacing, and the precision of each shot, is all part of giving the film its thematic weight. It’s like a medieval passion play, with every moment giving depth to the whole.

The film’s focus is on the children – tellingly, only characters below the age of about 20 are named. It’s their faces the camera returns to time and again – and the film is set in a key moment of many of their lives, where disillusionment with adults begin. The age when they begin to realise their parents are far from perfect and even hypocritical. The film more than suggests that it is the children – working in some combination or alone – responsible for the crimes that take place in the village. Their motivations range from anger and resentment to despair and a longing for escape.

Many of these events centre around the pastor’s family. Played with a perfect emotional austerity by Burghart Klaußner, the pastor judges all around him as unworthy, with his children suffering the brunt of his discipline. It’s easy to see he is overly harsh, hypocritical (the sheer number of his children suggests he hasn’t worked hard to suppress his own sexual feelings) and unjust. His son is tied to his bed while he sleeps to prevent “impure touching” and his daughter is blamed, and publicly humiliated by him, for a school disturbance she is trying to stop. He’s a father who demands respect but cannot inspire love.

Almost worst of all, he requires his children to wear a white ribbon, to constantly remind them of moral standards they have failed to live up to. These acts of stigmatisation and bullying are not balanced with any outward affection – whatever he may actually feel, the pastor is far too restrained to show any warmth – and Haneke demonstrates his children are taking all the wrong lessons from him. The learn to be cold, distant and judgemental, and that strength is vital and weaknesses are not to be tolerated: they beat out individual thinking, and replace it with cold conformity. A basically good man – and the pastor clearly believes he is doing his best to protect his children – rears children who see others as inferior and different, and stigmatisation as an essential part of life.

The whole village lives in medieval thrall to the baron. You could be believe this village was hundreds of years in the past, not a single century. The villagers slave on the baron’s fields, meekly tugging their forelocks to him in church. The baron takes unilateral decisions affecting everyone’s lives. His own family life is cold – his wife doesn’t love him (and her sexual, not romantic, faithfulness is the only thing that matters to him), while his weak young son is the victim of at least two crimes. It’s a pattern of distant, selfish authorities who believe they work for the good of the community, while taking everything they can from it.

But then corruption is also endemic at the home. Rainer Bock gives a chilling performance as the local doctor, respected by the community for his dedication, who treats those closest to him with disdain at best, and abusive cruelty at worst. A controlling, cruel man, the doctor is the clearest example in the film of the hypocrisy of the older generation, demanding respect, decency and obedience from the younger, while treating them with selfish vileness.

Haneke’s film is a grim – and disturbing – study of this sort of everyday horror and it effect on the psyche. The dehumanisation of the young is clear, and the growing casual cruelty they begin to dish out to others becomes more and more striking. The film taps into a Wyndhamish fear of the young, the children moving in packs, their respectful words not matching their air of menace. This unsettling feeling only grows because, for many of the crimes, we are never given a firm answer to who carries them out (although we can guess). Saying that, at least three acts of violence and sabotage are explicitly shown, all of them carried out by the young – enough for the viewer to suspect the others can be tied to the same generation.

The film does pepper itself with touches of hope – enough to suggest not everyone is destined to succumb to malevolent forces. The schoolteacher – sweetly played by Christian Friedel – is well-meaning, if ineffectual, and his courtship of the baron’s dismissed nanny Eva (an endearing Leonie Benesch) has a charming bashfulness. (Although the fact the couple are brow-beaten into postponing their marriage by her domineering father reminds us of the dominance of the older generation). After the pastor’s pet bird is killed (by his daughter, who crucifies the creature on his desk), he is moved to tears when his youngest son offers him his own pet bird to make him feel better (although inevitably the offer only promotes a curt “thank you” from the Pastor while his son is in the room). The women of the older generation all show signs for reluctance or discontent with the behaviour of the patriarchs, although any protest is of course in vain.

It’s touches like this that prevent Haneke’s film from being a lecture. The village isn’t inherently bad, just terribly misguided. This all enforces the universality of the film. You’re kidding yourself if you think this could only happen in Germany. These generational clashes and the twisting of an entire generation could happen anywhere. The world is what we make it, and the white ribbons that help us remember our innocence can just as easily be used to categorise us as the worthy and the unworthy. Haneke’s film is a brilliant, profound and challenging piece of work that rewards thought, analysis and rewatching. Quite possibly his masterpiece.