Verdacht (2015)

Journalist Eva Gruber and her husband Max, an artist and art teacher, lead a quiet married life. Max has just completed a sculpture for a retirement home, and the celebration is about to begin. But Max fails to show up at the party Eva has organized. Instead, a young, ambitious prosecutor has him arrested in front of his students at the high school. Max is accused of making pornography accessible to minors, and there is suspicion that he abused Xenia, one of his students. Eva considers the accusations baseless. She wants to prove that this is a gross miscarriage of justice, if not an abuse of the law. She confronts Xenia’s parents, who filed a complaint against Max, with the devastating consequences an abuse allegation will have for her husband. But Eva learns that Xenia spent a night with Max in his studio. During questioning by the prosecutor, Max’s attempts to justify himself are quickly brushed aside. His position is made more precarious by the fact that he often interpreted the curriculum in highly unconventional ways in class and did not shy away from explicit discussions of art. The works at the center of the controversy include pieces by Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Balthus and Gustave Courbet, which Max discussed with his underage students in art class. These included Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde, a naturalistic depiction of a woman’s vulva, covered only by her pubic hair. The painting not only confirms the prosecutor’s suspicion that the teacher is exploiting his students’ dependent relationship with him, but also inflames the already agitated parents. After the parents’ meeting, some of the fathers decide to take matters into their own hands. Eva continues to stand by her husband. To her, the accusations against Max are unfounded, even though she has to acknowledge that he has not always been honest with her. As a journalist, she sees the media and social campaign against Max the teacher as the result of society’s increasingly oversensitive and hypocritical approach to sexuality. During pretrial detention, Max is branded a pedophile by other inmates and beaten up. With the help of a lawyer, Eva manages to get him released from police custody. After they finally share a passionate night together again, she discovers links to porn sites featuring teens on his computer. Max describes them as ordinary masturbation material. But Eva is becoming less and less sure what she can believe. Then, under pressure from the parents, Max also loses his teaching job. The prosecutor finds a nude photo of his student Xenia, styled like Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, among the deleted data on Max’s phone. Confronted with it, Max tells his wife and the prosecutor that he received the nude photo from Xenia. She had taken it herself and sent it to him, but then realized her mistake and went to see him at his studio that same night. He, Max, found himself in an impossible dilemma: if he reported that she had sent him the intimate picture to the school administration, Xenia would be expelled; if he did not, he himself would get into trouble. So they had decided to delete the picture from their phones at the same time and agree to keep quiet. Nothing else, he says, happened between him and his student. But the prosecutor notices that the photo’s perspective required a second person; Xenia could not possibly have taken it herself. Now Eva’s brave, steadfast loyalty to her husband collapses. Although Max is not taken into pretrial detention again, she throws him out of their apartment and gets dead drunk. The next day, Eva’s female neighbors demand that Max be placed under a ban from the neighborhood to protect the local children. Completely hungover, Eva breaks down again in tears. Shortly afterward, she is visited by Xenia’s friend Deborah, who remorsefully admits that she told Eva only half the truth during their last conversation. The full truth comes out at the prosecutor’s office, during a discussion attended by Xenia, Deborah, their parents and lawyers, Max and Eva. The “sex photo” was nothing more than a drunken, stoned prank by the two friends, Xenia and Deborah. The charges against Max are dropped. Even so, Max cannot find another job as an art teacher. Xenia’s father, an influential corporate lawyer, has made sure that all the secondary schools in German-speaking Switzerland are informed about the incident. Eva discovers this, and Max then applies for a job as an art teacher in French-speaking Switzerland, where he is hired. When he starts his first day there, his new students ask their phones who Max Gruber is. The internet answers: a teacher who was fired for supplying pornography to his students.