Returning from the maternity leave, Anamarija is the new teacher in a elementary school. She tries to help students stage a play they wrote, even though the principal Vedrana is against it since the kids wrote a scene with a man snuffing glue in the park. A brute history teacher, Siniša, often scorns and taunts Anamarija, and deviates from the school curriculum. Kids publish YouTube videos of his rowdy behavior, which even attracts a journalist who enters the school trying to write a news report about it, but Vedrana kicks him out. After another crude remark, Anamarija anonymously reports Siniša to the education board, but everyone knows she did it, whereas Vedrana refuses to fire him since Siniša doesn't have enough length of service to go to a retirement. At the school play, Anamarija jus accepts the things as they are.
Sonja Tarokic's feature length debut film is a naturalistic microcosm of the chaotic world of teachers in a elementary school, where the characters feel authentic and the movie is directed in a modern way with elegant cuts and cinematic frames, yet it has a big flaw of feeling like a set of random, disjointed episodes that were not aligned into a clear or unifiying storyline with a specific goal in the finale, since the ending feels so abrupt as if the movie was left unfinished. "The Staffroom" will be mostly appreciated by teachers and professors, since it has a lot of sympathy for them trying to keep the education system going, and the leading actress Marina Redzepovic is excellent as the calm, intelligent teacher Anamarija. A strong "antagonist" was established in the brute history teacher Sinisa who feels like a 'stone in the shoe': in one scene, a sparrow died while crashing into the window, and Sinisa mockingly looks down at a teacher with it and says: "Give him CPR!" In another scene, a teacher gives an advice to Anamarija regarding talking with Sinisa: "He can sense when someone is weaker than him." A very good scene has Sinisa shouting at kids playing in the bus, who asked for a cleaning lady because they made a mess while eating, while Anamarija and another teacher intervene and warn him to restrain himself. When Anamarija finds her car tires slashed at the school parking lot, it seems the movie has taken a Haneke-style dark twist where her rivalry with Sinisa might go to an intense duel, but this is suddenly dropped and the movie instead just randomly spends time on other subplots, while this one was left incomplete. That's a pitty and a letdown, and some might even feel a bit cheated, though the dialogues feel genuine, and the reality of these characters palpable.
Grade:++
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