Austrian director Michael Haneke might be one of the most provocative working in the film industry today. I’ve shied away from using the term “Hollywood” because there is nothing in Hollywood that resembles the patience exhibited my Haneke—much less the pleasure taken in keeping an audience on pins and needles, forever hinting that a boogey man will leap out of the closet only to resign to the creepiness that is inherent to the characters that Haneke brings to the screen. In a way, I understand how a number of Haneke’s films might be considered unbearable to watch.
Honestly, I’m not sure how many times I can watch The Piano Teacher without becoming completely—and depressingly—introspective.
At the same time, Haneke possesses a gift for marrying suspense, intrigue and social commentary that is rarely seen in contemporary cinema—The Coen Brothers present these qualities admirably, as do Paul Thomas Anderson and Jason Reitman.
(Note: I’m sure there are one or two glaring omissions, but my inability to recall them right now attests to the fact that we as a movie-viewing culture are more bombarded with the likes of the superbly untalented Michael Bay, the corn-syrup aficionado Rob Zombie, or M. Night Shyamalan.)
That said, here is a rundown of four Haneke films:
The White Ribbon
Recently nominated for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award, The White Ribbon veers from a number of Haneke’s earlier films in that no single scene takes the audience’s breath away. In Funny Games, your spine continuously tingles and threatens to escape through your lower back. The Piano Teacher covers you in a wave of sadomasochism and threatens to drown you in Erika’s dementia. Cache casts the viewer as a voyeur who silently and unwittingly augers a chasm between a wife and her husband who is haunted by subconscious lamentations that resurface from mysterious surveillance tapes that appear on his doorstep.
Set in a small village in northern Germany before the start of World War I, The White Ribbon explores the existence of evil and its indifference to social class and gender. Yet, somehow the evil is subdued. A doctor breaks his clavicle when he is thrown from his horse that trips over a taut wire that has been placed between two trees on the doctor’s regular route. At the same time, the maliciousness of such a deliberate sabotage needs to be questioned when the audience discovers that the incestuous, pedophilic doctor had been cheating on her husband with the concubinal house-nurse. Therefore, is evil justified as it takes on the form of retribution, or is evil begetting evil?
Shot in a beautiful black and white that gently blends the background’s variegated palate of grays with the over-illuminated white skin of small village’s denizens, The White Ribbon resembles a documentary, maintaining a safe distance form characters who we read as innocent but who sweat ambivalence by the end of the film.
Most profoundly, Haneke offers commentary on our perception of history. The film comes to a close shortly after Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been assassinated—which is usually the high-school-centered rhetoric that is blamed for the cause of World War I. With The White Ribbon, Haneke does not offer a history lesson, but suggests that all people are capable of apathy, indifference and acts of violence for personal gain and retribution; we merely need a broader excuse to channel those qualities into a large-scale, collective offensive.
Cache
From frame one, the audience is a surveillance camera, our look cast upon the front of a French apartment building where nothing appears to happen aside from every day comings and goings, passersby on bicycles, cars parking and driving off. Soon, these tapes are dropped off on the doorstep of George and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), spurring anxiety from the random creepiness and driving a wedge between the couple as George internalizes the intrusion as punishment for jealousy-driven actions he took as a child to prevent his parents from adopting Majid, a young boy whose own parents were murdered.
Fortifying George’s paranoia is the fact that the tapes are wrapped in construction paper that has obscure images drawn on them. Resembling Rorschach-style free association, the first image of a male stick figure with a splotch of red near his mouth conjures memories of George’s bleeding nose. Another image is that of what appears to be a crudely scribbled bird with a streak of red across its neck with recalls images of George tricking Majid into decapitating one of George’s father’s chickens.
The deliverer of the tapes is never revealed, nor is the reason for them—which only increases the creepiness of Cache—but what the audience is left with is the Foucaultian sense of vulnerability and objectification. Privacy is an illusion, and personal guilt is a powerful weapon when someone else wields it.
The Piano Teacher
Isabelle Hupert gives a stellar—and eerily enrapturing—performance as Erika Kohut, a pianist whose social and sexual desires have been long-overshadowed by her devotion to music, but Kohut has reached middle age and is resigned to being a professor who remains steps away from her idols Schubert and Schumann.
Kohut’s sadism makes this film uneasy to watch (in a subdued fit of jealousy, Kohut breaks a glass within a silk handkerchief and places the shards in the coat pocket of one of her young students), but Hupert plays the character with a stoic veneer that often cracks to expose the vulnerable underbelly that craves physical and sensual attention. Soon, Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), a young man with moderate talent enters Kohut’s life as a student and confesses his infatuation with her. Wearing the façade of domineering instructor, Kohut demeans him by dragging him into the woman’s bathroom and masturbates him while barking that he not look at her, not move, not touch her. Underneath, Kohut is as lost sexually as she is socially, visiting male-oriented x-rated video stores and peepshows, which suggests that she is unaware of her own sexuality, much less female sexuality in general. In addition, she walks drive-in movie theaters, searching for cars with sexually active teens so that she might eavesdrop on their moans and groans while masturbating outside of their steamed windows.
The audience’s mutual ride with Kohut perpetually spirals when she bring Walter back to her flat—one that she shares with her domineering, obsessive mother—and hands him a letter that proffers a masochistic rape scenario that she would like to be the victim in. Taken aback, Walter is disgusted and flees the flat, but here the audience is left wondering whether or not this is part of Kohut’s desires. Ultimately, there is a rape scene, but it is never clear until a split-second frame in the last two minutes of the movie whether Kohut’s pleas for salvation are genuine or if it’s simply a sexually awakening catharsis. Regardless, Kohut’s psyche is caught adrift in a churning sea, and amazingly, Hupert and Haneke subtly tether us to the rogue waves, threatening to drown us before permitting a final breath.
Funny Games (2007)
In a remake of his 1997 film, Haneke brings Funny Games into the American consciousness, and while it wasn’t received with open arms—unlike his Austrian original—it is my favorite film of his because it questions our expectations of the reality that we ascribe to the events of a film. In other words, we root for the protagonist because this person has been established as the innocent who finds him or herself in the grasp of unfortunate circumstance. But in the end, good will overcome, and the antagonist will expose—most often—his Achilles heel and is either killed, locked up, forced to retreat from the situation, typically leaving at least one antagonist alive, even if he or she is wounded (this only increases our sympathy for the character and probability for an over-budgeted, underwhelming sequel—Hannibal comes to mind).
In Funny Games, Haneke toys with the audience from the first five minutes when a family of three, mother Ann, father George, and son Georgie travel in their Dodge Caravan on a winding mountain road. In literary fashion, the first characters we meet are those we are connected to a la Edgar Allen Poe’s use of murders as his first person narrators/murders. At the same time—with the exception of Georgie, an innocence-seething-child who ultimately dies first—Ann and George Farber (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) are not all that likable. Rather, they are pretentious yuppies whose conversation during the drive is a contest to name the composer, opera, and operatic piece of music that they are listening to. Classical appreciation does not connote pretention, but each response to the other is condescending and belittling.
Ann:
Bjorling. (with confidence) Suliodis?
George:
Close. Bjorling is easy.
Ann:
Tibaldi.
Ann wins, chooses a CD. Inserts Handel’s “Care Selve Obre Beate”
George:
Oh God (arrogantly). Uh, Gigli (sarcastically).
Ann:
Of course, but what?
At the same time that this yuppiedom encapsulates the happy family in the Caravan, Haneke positions us on eye-level with driver George and Ann as if we were peering at them through the back window of a Ford Probe that blasts Naked City’s thrash-metal ballad “Bonehead”; this camera technique simultaneously connects us to the Farbers while detaching us from their vacuumed bliss, denoting us as outsiders looking in.
Still, when the Farbers arrive at their summer home and encounter the austere and eerily polite Peter and Paul (Bradley Corbet and Michael Pitt), we need to root for their survival, even though George Farber reveals himself as little more than a pathetic, pusillanimous weakling who relies on his wife to become the self-sacrificing family savior. While Naomi Watts delivers a powerful, heart-wrenching performance as a woman determined to protect her family, the gravity with which she is thrust into the role is disturbing merely because it attests to George’s cowardice.
Admittedly, there are gimmicky moments within Funny Games—like when Ann quickly rips a shotgun from Paul’s grasp and shoots Peter in the chest, leading us to a moment of protagonist victory and the demise of evil incarnate, but all is erased when Paul mordantly chuckles and then seeks the “fucking remote control” to reverse Peter’s tragic murder. However, after subsequent viewings, this scene strikes me as no less gimmicky than a movie that would progress with underdog Ann ripping a shotgun from Paul’s grasp and shooting Peter in the chest, leading us to a moment of protagonist victory and the demise of evil incarnate. Although difficult to watch without reminding your spine that it shouldn’t try to escape through your lower back, Funny Games reminds us of the minimal realism that exists in movies by visually—and literally—erasing the fantastical element that allows the “hero” to usurp her captors and emerge victorious.
