An idealistic young educator is ostracized for her lack of teaching skills and civil graces. Full of youthful idealism, Melanie Proeschle leaves her rural flat and boyfriend to take a mid-year post teaching fifth and ninth graders in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe. The school atmosphere is immediately intimidating and her older colleagues are dismissive of her more progressive teaching techniques. The only teacher near her own age is the geeky Thorsten Rehm, who seems friendly but
comes on too strong. Things seem initially more promising at home, where Melanie greets her new neighbors with homemade schnapps before initiating a tentative friendship with the infinitely more worldly, Tina Schaffner, who lives across the way. The worse things get at school, the more Melanie begins to overcompensate by inserting herself in Tina's life. At first friendly and tolerant, the neighbor soon grows openly hostile, prompting Melanie to succumb to the pressures of her life.
Tapping in to primal fears of professional ineptitude and social rejection with an almost sadistic meticulousness, The Forest for the Trees is a precisely modulated first film.
Eva Löbau's lynchpin performance as Melanie is a shattering lesson in the tropes of timidity and awkwardness, and serves in taking this cinema of cruelty into as yet uncharted territory.
I was interested from the start with the wonderful sense of being present with this sounds, the settings, the characters, and Eva Lobau gave us someone to want to look into. But the story was going to drive this character and the film to the destination already programmed in, regardless of how many turnoffs they
missed. After awhile, I wasn't sure whether I was thinking "Come on!" to a missed opportunity or another too obvious plot twist. I would look forward to another film by the same director, because the sense of life and the acting had so much promise of vision and voice. I just wish I hadn't been so frustrated by procrustean plot. I am grateful, however, for finally getting the opportunity to use "procrustean" accurately in a sentence. I can take that off my bucket list.
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