About ten minutes into Michael, you realize that there is no angel from Saturday Night Fever coming to shatter the innocent veneer or heavenly ideology. The protagonist of Markus Schleinzer’s Michael is a quiet insurance salesman. He smokes like our aforementioned angel, has a beer over dinner, but aside from the ten-year-old boy he keeps locked in his soundproof basement, he’s a pretty average guy who likes downhill skiing and watching movies before turning on the breaker box to his captor’s room and anally raping him.
Given the grimly disturbing subject matter, I wasn’t sure how much of this film I could sit through without chalking it up as snuff, but Shleinzer’s history of working with Michale Haneke prompted me to hit play. Schleinzer, like Haneke, tackles the grotesque and the disturbing, but does it without hyperbolizing the situation and transforming the film into “artistic snuff.” Michael is similar to Funny Games (both versions) inasmuch as the disturbing images or elided and left to the imagination – something that becomes doubly disturbing.
Take the act of pederasty for example. Our antagonist turns on the breaker box and exits the securely locked room. There are no noises, screams, protestations, or glimpses of the boy before the door closes. But moments later, we are brought to the bathroom while our rapist is washing his penis in the sink. The image here casts a visceral pall over the film and shatters any sympathy that might have been created for our main character.
Let me back up here lest I am suddenly put on a watch list.
Prior to their nightly transgression, one wonders what is out of the ordinary in this tandem – aside from the boy living in a basement. There is no soundtrack throughout the film, and, as it begins, our captor arrives home from work with a few bags of groceries and proceeds to make dinner – not in a dog dish or a makeshift bag of frozen peas and boxed potatoes, but a rather elegant dinner in the dining room, with candles, placemats, stem wear, and neatly folded napkins. Sure, the metal shades that slowly close prior to serving dinner are a rather ominous harbinger, but we all have our quirks.
As the boy is let out of the basement, he is clean and nicely dressed. This image of the boy does not bespeak physical abuse or malnutrition. They sit and eat dinner, with the boy asking if he “can watch the telly” until bed, which uncannily echoes an avuncular conversation. Our antagonist agrees, and they sit watching television. At nine o’clock, our boy is sent to bed to ensure he gets enough sleep. Until this point, Schleinzer plays with our perceptions of two juxtaposing forces. The disturbing crime is apparent, as is the strange affection conjured by the familiar dinner table. We’re unsure how to judge the nefariousness of the scenario until the shot in the bathroom.
In addition, the elision of the rape scene is rather powerful. Like Haneke, Schleinzer forces us to imagine what has happened, how long it happened for, and to what extent. I’m not sure there’s a way to rationalize the situation to say “Well, it was only a little rape,” but prohibiting us from seeing the act forces us to determine how much of a monster this man is. We weigh the dinner and the, initially, kind words; we observe his quiet demeanor; we see him succeed at work; we know about the boy in the basement.
A similar juxtaposition also occurs on the movie poster (see above for a portion): the back of the boy’s head is to us, and an adult’s hand rests on the back of his neck. The image here is curious because it signifies a close relative guiding a youth as they walk down the street. However, the hand does not rest on the shoulder, but seems to clutch the back of the neck as if to give the appearance of comfort to the passersby, but reassure the boy that his neck could be easily clutched and snapped if he ran away. This is something that is also eerily apparent when the two go to the park; they pass a father and son who hold hands while a hand is constantly clutched on our ten-year-old’s scruff.
The title also toys with us. Given the boy’s presence on the movie’s poster, the name “Michael” is immediately linked to him; however, Michael is the pedophile’s name, and we don’t learn this for almost an hour into the movie. We are set to watch an unmentioned man and an unnamed child in this devious dynamic. And, over time, we begin to link the name of the movie to the name of the hostage, creating a sympathy around this moniker, wondering who Michael’s parents are and whether they’re still looking for him. Therefore, the discovery of who Michael is shocks us a bit, forcing us to transfer the sympathy we’ve applied to this name to a twisted reprobate.
Thus, Michael makes us wonder whether Schleizner’s intent is to fool with the audience or to say something poignant about the misunderstood nature of criminals and how we profile those who are overtly disturbed, selecting them because they don’t fit our construction of “normal”: a job, a house, a car. Certainly, I don’t believe that the director is sympathizing with pedophiles or criminals, but I do feel he’s taking a very cynical look at loneliness and its effects. Throughout, we can infer that Michael is a shut in, for obvious reasons, but also because he seems generally socially awkward. He chooses not to see his family for Christmas, he sits alone during lunch at work, he answers with one to two word responses, and his awareness of conversation and social mores seem to come from movies.
All in all, the movie plays like you figure it will, until the end when it offers no closure. We’re unsure the fate of the boy, and the events that lead to this potential glimpse that never comes are bittersweet.
