There are reasons to be grateful for the existence of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, even if you don’t exactly fall in love with his movies. He is a master craftsman, as devoted to technical precision as the finest Hollywood journeyman, as formally rigorous as the most innovative arthouse maverick, and, most impressively, has maintained this standard while working in different languages and different countries with distinct industries. He’s prolific—10 features in 20 years, with another on the way—yet a case can be made for his having never made a single film that’s contributed to what he describes as the disempowerment of the audience. Long after the golden age of foreign and art film distribution, Haneke has held unrelentingly to a mandate of consistently challenging movies and survived, even thrived. And that’s fascinating in itself: large numbers of people see Haneke’s films, yet not a one of them promises a good time in any normal sense. They’re downright unpleasant. And there is no release.
The ten features tell a story in themselves, of a singular career, of an aesthetic, of an evolving social critique, of an increasingly amalgamated Europe and globalized world. Thanks to Metro Cinema’s generous full retrospective, Edmonton filmgoers can watch it all unfold completely and chronologically, one chilling, enigmatic, unbroken single-shot scene at a time.
Based on actual events, The Seventh Continent (1989) is a sort of diptych that’s devastatingly effective in its simplicity. A bourgeois family of three is shown performing quotidian tasks—closing doors, preparing breakfast, tying shoes—often in close-ups that show no preference for faces or offer clues that might convey an internal life. This series of what would be inserts in a conventional movie is strangely riveting, brimming with a certain tension. Devoid of scoring and making use of black leader between scenes, there’s genuine beauty to the clipped rhythm of it all, to the collage of room tones, and the superbly specifying actors—including the late Ulrich Mühe, a Haneke regular—embody the tone plausibly. Haneke’s debut follows the course of the family’s routines, checking in to see how they alter over three years, until the machinery of their “lifestyle” suddenly collapses in one of cinema’s most sustained sequences of intensely concentrated, near-wordless action. The result is really a perfect movie on its own terms, with an inspired balance of overt polemic and ambiguity. It also, to a surprising degree, perfectly encapsulates so much of what’s to come.
Benny’s Video (92) advances certain aspects of its predecessor while focusing more pointedly on what is surely Haneke’s central zone of interest: visual media. The horrific Oedipal journey of teenage Benny (Arno Frisch) is one filtered through the abstraction of increasingly accessible video technology, which Haneke proposes as facilitating voyeuristic tendencies to ever-more alarming degrees. A crudely-made video of animal slaughter is slowed-down in replay, making what was initially intended as a quick, relatively painless death into a weirdly aestheticized bloodbath. Benny, almost always placid, seems completely untouched by the Real, in the Lacanian sense. He seems to process the world exclusively through video screens. Video becomes a component in teenage mating rituals, which themselves house experiments in punishment. So there is watching, there is death, and there is the cleaning up afterwards. There’s also a mother-son vacation to Egypt, where the unruliness of the greater word is still kept always at arm’s, or, as it were, eye’s length. It’s also kind of boring, but this very carefully-nourished boredom seems vital to how this all works. Haneke’s gaze can be at once that of a visionary director and that of an especially patient anthropologist. If you can jive with both sensibilities, you’re in for the long haul.
There is, however, the problem of Funny Games (97) to contend with. Haneke’s most notoriously merciless work, an anti-thriller in which a pair of absurdly polite hooligans (one of whom is Frisch, as though picking up where he left off) terrorize another of Haneke’s bourgeois families on holiday, is brutal, but it’s also quickly numbing and over-intellectualized while feeling intellectually facile. Haneke seems to have had a checklist of items he considered antithetical to genre moviemaking—kill the dog, kill the kid, break the fourth wall—and went about dutifully seeing each through. The irony lies in how, at the best of times, the very sort of polished Hollywood thriller Funny Games explicitly opposes can actually prove far more thought provoking than such exercises in didacticism. Yet Haneke was clearly happy with the results. He re-made the thing, shot-for-shot, as his English-language debut with Hollywood stars (07). I wonder if he liked the marketing—Warner pitched it exactly as if it were a generic thriller.
With Code Unknown (00), Haneke arrives at a major turning point and delivers what may be his finest work. His first film made in France inverted the hermetically-sealed strategy of Funny Games, broadening his perspective to take in a larger network of character types, relationships, social confrontations and causalities, and Juliette Binoche, who from her first moment onscreen introduces a warmth and fullness of character previously unseen, if not un-permitted, in Haneke’s work. Brilliantly book-ended with scenes of deaf-mute children playing charades—an elegant expression of the title—the remainder of Code Unknown consists of scenes, nearly all of them playing out in single, unbroken shots, that explore questions of what is and isn’t other people’s business, from an uppity young black man’s attempt at forcing an act of social justice to Binoche’s paralysis when overhearing domestic violence to a photojournalist’s resurrection of Walker Evans’ fabled journey through the New York subway system taking surreptitious photos of strangers. Like the unseen, rather obnoxious director who at one point auditions Binoche’s actress, the photojournalist seems to be hunting for a “real face.” Yet, while I’d argue that Code Unknown explores inter-connectivity with greater resonance than films like Paul Haggis’ Crash (04) or Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (07), Haneke is never so assuring. The characters here, spanning class, race, nationality, education and age, are given freer reign to reveal a richness of attitude, anxieties and even fleeting moments of happiness and relief. But their environment doesn’t make room for complete vulnerability and so many masks are worn that the very notion of witnessing truth becomes futile. This was the first Haneke I saw, and it remains a personal favourite.
Haneke’s embracing of France and its great actresses continued to great acclaim—and even greater controversy—with The Piano Teacher (01), an adaptation of fellow Austrian Elfriede Jelinek’s novel. Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut, an instructor obsessed with a 17-year-old pupil, is a creature of a sort I’m not sure the movies had ever previously given us: intensely sexually repressed, sadomasochistic, obsessive, icy in that way that disguises overwhelming anguish, capable of Elektralian hysteria, and never for a moment less than magnetic. It is a career-capping performance, and with Huppert that says a lot.
With Code Unknown (00), Haneke arrives at a major turning point and delivers what may be his finest work. His first film made in France inverted the hermetically-sealed strategy of Funny Games, broadening his perspective to take in a larger network of character types, relationships, social confrontations and causalities, and Juliette Binoche, who from her first moment onscreen introduces a warmth and fullness of character previously unseen, if not un-permitted, in Haneke’s work. Brilliantly book-ended with scenes of deaf-mute children playing charades—an elegant expression of the title—the remainder of Code Unknown consists of scenes, nearly all of them playing out in single, unbroken shots, that explore questions of what is and isn’t other people’s business, from an uppity young black man’s attempt at forcing an act of social justice to Binoche’s paralysis when overhearing domestic violence to a photojournalist’s resurrection of Walker Evans’ fabled journey through the New York subway system taking surreptitious photos of strangers. Like the unseen, rather obnoxious director who at one point auditions Binoche’s actress, the photojournalist seems to be hunting for a “real face.” Yet, while I’d argue that Code Unknown explores inter-connectivity with greater resonance than films like Paul Haggis’ Crash (04) or Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (07), Haneke is never so assuring. The characters here, spanning class, race, nationality, education and age, are given freer reign to reveal a richness of attitude, anxieties and even fleeting moments of happiness and relief. But their environment doesn’t make room for complete vulnerability and so many masks are worn that the very notion of witnessing truth becomes futile. This was the first Haneke I saw, and it remains a personal favourite.
Haneke’s embracing of France and its great actresses continued to great acclaim—and even greater controversy—with The Piano Teacher (01), an adaptation of fellow Austrian Elfriede Jelinek’s novel. Isabelle Huppert’s Erika Kohut, an instructor obsessed with a 17-year-old pupil, is a creature of a sort I’m not sure the movies had ever previously given us: intensely sexually repressed, sadomasochistic, obsessive, icy in that way that disguises overwhelming anguish, capable of Elektralian hysteria, and never for a moment less than magnetic. It is a career-capping performance, and with Huppert that says a lot.
When Huppert returns for Haneke’s criminally under-seen dystopian drama Time of the Wolf (03), the only way she can kick things off properly is to get sprayed with her murdered husband’s blood and then vomit in the first five minutes. From there, the apocalypse is a paddleboat ride. Whatever disaster befell society before the story begins is—and here’s a surprise—left undefined. Yet in destroying the social order, the media and consumer-based society, it’s also robbed Haneke of the key subjects of his entire canon. The good news is that Haneke not only rises to the occasion but also proves just what a shrewd and atmospheric storyteller he can be with a minimum of elements. And of course, as Huppert’s Anne and her children traverse the countryside to fend for themselves, the customs of civilized society will haunt them in their every encounter. (It’ll be interesting to see how this film compares to John Hillcoat’s forthcoming The Road.) Whether you know Haneke’s work or not, I urge you to catch this one in a rare public screening.
Haneke’s almost perverse emphasis on the irresolvable finds its apotheosis in Caché (05), another hit, and his most recent, though hopefully not last French film. Pairing Binoche with Daniel Auteuil, Caché returns to the sinister voyeurism of Benny’s Video by way of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (97), when a Parisian bourgeois couple starts receiving anonymous videocassettes that feature only unedited footage of their home’s exterior. Haneke has insisted in interviews that he hasn’t been especially interested in specificity of location in his films and that readings emphasizing the conditions of a certain national culture are usually made out of a failure to recognize how these stories could take place anywhere in the first world. It’s a respectable and quite instructive stance, but I still think it makes Caché that much richer a movie when we account for the particularities of the Algerian War and the Paris massacre of 1961. There is a ghost lurking in this story that demands to be reckoned with. It is a ghost not dissimilar to those haunting other nations, but it looms over these characters with a particular gravity, making it an interesting companion piece to Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Muriel (63).
Which brings up to the present, post-Funny Games US and pre-The White Ribbon, Haneke’s first Austrian film in a dozen years. Despite the divisive retroactive—not to mention reactionary—aspects of his last movie, Metro’s retrospective reminds us that there’s every reason to anticipate more provocative and fascinating work from Haneke. I only hope there continues to be room in the world for the likes of him.
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