In Review: 'Ferrari,' 'The Teachers' Lounge'

You could program a double feature about high-pressure jobs out of a pair of recent releases: the latest from Michael Mann and Germany's Academy Awards submission.

Ferrari
Dir. Michael Mann
124 min.

The importance of the first few minutes of Ferrari only becomes clear in retrospect. Michael Mann opens his biopic with black-and-white scenes of a long-ago race that integrates shots of a young Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) into vintage race footage. Depicting a moment from Enzo’s racing career, the short scene ends with him crossing the finish line in first place and breaking into a smile. We’ll see him smile again over the course of the film, but never with such untempered joy, almost as if he’s spent the years since that victory and 1957, the tumultuous year in which Ferrari takes place, chasing how he felt in that moment.

The carefully worded one-sentence title card that introduces the film matters too: “Ex-racer Enzo Ferrari and his wife Laura started Auto Costruzioni Ferrari in the ruins of post-war Italy in 1947.” Both the “ex-racer” label and the centrality of Laura (Penelope Cruz) to the business play sizable roles in the film that follows. Whatever power Enzo has accrued by making the Ferrari name synonymous with expensive sports cars, he’s now a man now watching others compete from the sidelines. And, ten years after the company’s founding, neither the family business nor the family are in particularly great shape.

Long-in-the-works (screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin died in 2009), Ferrari otherwise asks viewers to keep up by watching Enzo experience one personal and professional crisis after another. From its base in Modena, Ferrari sells cars to Middle Eastern royalty but remains locked in competition on the track and in car dealerships with their rivals at Maserati. With their marriage already made fragile by the still-recent death of their son Dino, Laura and Enzo fight all the time. For Laura, Enzo’s infidelities have grown too conspicuous, even before she becomes aware of his ongoing affair with a woman named Lida (Shailene Woodley), with whom he’s raising a second son named Piero (Giuseppe Festinese). After an accident kills one of Enzo’s best drivers, winning the upcoming Mille Miglia, a grueling open-air race around much of Italy, begins to look like Ferrari's only chance to stay afloat.

Ferrari is very much a Michael Mann film, albeit one that occasionally provides a reminder that it’s also a biopic, however tight its focus is on one year in Enzo’s life. Speaking of Enzo’s dead brother, their mother laments, “The wrong son died,” a cliché that Walk Hard should have laid to bed forever. Laura’s first scene is that of a long-suffering woman who, dammit, has been pushed too far. So are most of her subsequent scenes. But it’s also a superior biopic in most respects. Driver plays Enzo as an imperious man always on the verge of revealing his fears but only letting the mask drop in private moments. Cruz summons remarkable intensity that makes Laura’s confrontations feel motivated by passion, not movie formula.

Still, it’s the Mann-ness that sets Ferrari apart. Its racing scenes have a sometimes startling, airless immediacy even apart from its depiction of the horrific moment that came to define the 1957 Mille Miglia. And though Enzo Ferrari was a real person, as depicted here he might as well have been invented to serve as the subject of a Mann movie. He’s in thrall to an all-consuming obsession that draws others into its orbit, sometimes crushing them in the process. His focus and code explains his every action. When a driver hoping to join his team refers to a previous attempt on the streets of Modena cut short when Enzo drove away, Enzo offers no apology, only an explanation: “The light, it turned green.” —Keith Phipps

Ferrari is now in theaters.

The Teachers’ Lounge
Dir. Ilker Çatak
98 min.

The Teachers’ Lounge depicts the structural breakdown of a German middle school, but its opening scene immediately suggests the gleaming, seemingly model institution has already passed the point of no return. To get to the bottom of some recent thefts, a group of teachers quizzes members of the student council about the crimes. Do they know who did it? Failing that, maybe they could suggest the names of some students who might have done it? A new arrival, Ms. Nowak (Leonie Benesch) looks on in concern but can’t stop the interrogation. She shields herself in idealism, but it may not be protection enough.

Ms. Nowak is further concerned when suspicion falls on Ali (Can Rodenbostel), a son of immigrants whose parents are quick, and almost certainly right, to suggest prejudice might play a role in the school’s accusation. This has to end, and Ms. Nowak fashions herself enough of a sleuth to solve the crimes herself, even gathering seemingly incontrovertible evidence of the true culprit’s identity. But when she tries to act on these suspicions, the school’s problems, and hers, only grow worse.

Directed by Ilker Çatak from a script co-written with Johannes Duncker, The Teachers’ Lounge plays at times like a cross between Election and an white-knuckle thriller. Ms. Nowak finds herself pitted against cliques and subject to reprisals, developments that threaten to push her across ethical lines she never intended to cross. The parallels to the larger world—from the implications of a surveillance state to journalistic censorship—are hard to miss. Though some details are undoubtedly specific to contemporary Germany, most are recognizable as elements of any democracy, particularly those in danger of losing sight of their core principles. Çatak can’t quite sustain the tension or stretch the allegory all the way to the film’s end, but by then its dark, sharp humor has created a memorable world in which good intentions mean nothing, principles get put aside for the sake of convenience, and the kids call bullshit on all of it. Any happy ending might have to wait until the next generation begins running the place. —Keith Phipps

The Teachers’ Lounge is now playing in select theaters and will expand in January.