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Michael Haneke studied philosophy at the University of Wien (Vienna).
His pessimistic, lugubrious existentialist philosophy, centered around the
theme of "emotional glaciation", permeates his films.
Haneke debuted with
Der Siebente Kontinent/ The Seventh Continent (1989), whose protagonists
(a middle-class family that commits suicide) are incapable of emotions.
Benny's Video (1992)
71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls/ 71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance (1994)
After an adaptation of Kafka's Das Schloss/ The Castle (1995),
Funny Games (1997) is a brutal fresco of mindless sadistic adolescent
violence (two kids torture a family) a` la Kubrick's Clockwork Orange.
and Wenders's The End of Violence, but without any major physical violence,
enhanced with Pirandellian and Becket-ian actor self-consciuosness.
The psychos here enjoy humiliating and psychological torture. They enjoy
playing with the minds (not the bodies) of their victims. That's why the
proceedings are so slow and quiet. That's where the terror comes from: not
from violence but from quiescence.
The game that the psychos play is a game with the human mind. The torturers
enjoy the agony of human beings trying to make sense of the irrational.
The premise is an old Hitchcock-ian trick: the devastation caused by an
unpredictable, irrational event to a simple ordinary life.
But Haneke drags that premise to its extreme consequences: the complete annihilation of the victim's psychology.
Haneke himself behaves like the torturer. He occasionally lets hope creep out
only to smash it in the next sequence (notably when he even rewinds his own
film under the nose of the viewer). Haneke humiliates the viewer's desire
for a happy ending, as much as his characters humiliate their victims.
Haneke patiently and quietly toys with the viewer the same way that his characters toy with their victims.
Another dimension of the drama that sets this one apart is the casual reference
to the atheism of the victims that occurs towards the ending. All of the sudden
the viewer realizes that they never invoked the help of God. In the old days
it was the evil ones who did not believe in God. Now it's the victims.
A film trailing a boat is driving through an idyllic forest (shown from a
helicopter). Inside a couple, Anne and George, are playing a game: guessing
the title of classical musical pieces. They have a little boy in the back seat.
As they drive past the mansion of their friends who are on the lawn with two
young strangers, who appear to be scions of wealthy families,
she says "hi" but the friends hardly respond.
Fred walks by to introduce one of the two youngsters, the polite and shy Paul.
Later, when Anne is alone at home, the apparently courteous and servile
Paul returns to borrow some eggs. On the way out he drops the eggs and then
asks for more and then breaks them too, and Anne realizes that his manners are
not so good after all. Minutes later the barking of the dog announces that
Paul is back, and this time he is with his friend Peter. Both are all clad
in white, wearing white gloves and seem nervous.
She gets nervous too as she doesn't understand what they want. Peter asks
permission to test George's golf clubs. Anne loses her patience, especially
after Peter calls his friend "Tom" and not Paul. Anne asks them to leave, but
Peter demands the eggs before leaving. Anne gets angry. George walks in and
initially thinks that Anne is overreacting but when he asks them to leave
Peter hits him with the club, breaking his knee. The kids keep talking calmly,
in a plain tone. The family is terrified as it becomes apparent that the two
are psychos. Peter asks them to guess why he has the gulf club in his pocket:
because he tested the club with something else... their dog (whose dead body
they lead
Anne to find in the trunk of the car). The two kids are in no hurry. They
are still calm and relaxed. A boat approaches: it's their friends Robert
and Betsy. Paul stands by Anne as she welcomes the guests.
When the friends have left and she's back inside, she asks the kinds a question
with a "please" and the kids remark the "please", implying that the psychology
has changed: she has realized that she's the slave, not the master.
When George tries to restore his authority, they hit him in the leg and punch
Anne in the stomach. Not much violence, but enough to assert "their" authority.
Paul calmly offers a bet to them: he wants to bet that they will be dead in
twelve hours. George tries to make sense of their behavior, but they don't
want money. In fact, the kids make fun of his seriousness. They want to play.
Paul grabs the child and threatens to suffocate and strangle him if the man
does not order his wife to take off her clothes. It's a double humiliation:
the man has to ask his wife, and his wife has to strip naked. Then they sit
on the couch and enjoy the strip tease, while tears are rolling down her
cheeks. Then they let her get dressed again. While she is getting dressed,
George helps the child escape. The child hides upstairs and waits for the dark
to sneak out. Paul calmly tapes the half-naked Anne's feet and hands so she cannot escape and then
sets out to find the boy. The boy finds a gun but Paul challenges him to pull
the trigger knowing that there is no bullet. After the boy is reunited with his
parents, the kids load the gun and Paul lets Peter decide who to kill first.
Then the camera follows Paul while he goes to the kitchen and looks for food.
We hear the gunshot and someone agonizing and crying,
while Paul calmly fixes himself a snack. Then the camera returns
to the living room but only to show stains of blood on the tv set.
We don't see them as they say goodbye and calmly leave the house.
Then the camera shows the woman, getting up from the armchair, next to her
dead son. As she hops around the living room looking for a knife, we see
that George is still moving. After she frees herself, she hugs him and helps
him get on his feet. But then they find out that the kids have locked the doors
of the house... and we realize that the "game" is not over, that the two kids
are still playing with their victims (and that the director is still playing
with the viewer).
In a lengthy sequence she first tries in vain to reactivate their cellular
phone. Then George tells her to leave the house and look for help.
She runs outside and hesitates to stop the first car. She stops the second one... Minutes later George hears a noise and sees the golf ball rolling towards him: they are back, with his wife. The want to play another game. They have to decide who gets killed next. They ask Anne to help. Anne does not reply. Peter uses his knife on her husband (the camera sticks with Anne's pain-stricken face).
Anne accepts to play the game. Paul asks her to say a prayer to God. Anne confesses that she doesn't know any, and it's obvious that she doesn't believe in
God (she never once begged God for help, nor does she now).
Peter suggests one and she repeats it. Then Paul asks her to say the prayer
backwards. In a tone reminiscent of television quiz shows, Paul promises her
a prize: choosing who will be killed first and even with which device (the slow
painful death by knife or the fast painless death by gun). She grabs the gun
and shoots Peter dead. Paul curses, walks around the living room, finds the
remote control, rewinds the movie (we literally see the last scene quickly
backwards) and restarts from the point where she grabbed the gun. This time
he grabs the gun from her in time, and then coldly executes George.
It's morning. The kids take Anne outside and lay her down in the boat, bound
and gagged. They sail to the middle of the lake, while casually discussing
philosophy. Then they push the woman down and continue their conversation
on the way to another house. Next we see Paul calling at another house, the
house of the friends who briefly visited Anne, asking for some eggs...
(Note: Mel Brooks' Spaceballs had already employed the trick of
rewinding the film that is playing).
Code Unbekannt/ Cone Inconnu/ Code Unknown (2001) lacks the visceral
sadistic intensity of Haneke's masterpieces. It adopts a realist almost sociological
approach instead the usual hyper-psychological violence. Its leitmotiv is
the melting pot of Western society, not the decadence of Western society.
Its structure of parallel episodes that are more or less inter-related
is not new, but few such movies have used interlocking stories that are
so brief and cryptic. Furthermore, almost every episode is a very long take
and most of them end abruptly.
The premise of the "story" is to
show the devastating consequences of an apparently insignificant incident.
An underlying theme is the "cowardice" and coldness of the rich Western Europeans.
When something evil happens, they pretend not to see and not to hear: they
want to pretend that order reigns unchallenged. So the protagonist does not
help the child that is being murdered, and nobody helps her when she becomes
the target of a punk. It's the immigrants who are more likely to speak up
and stand up, to accept that disorder, and not order, is the norm, and that
one has to fight to restore order. By analogy, the wars in Kosovo and in
Afghanistan are juxtaposed with the peace in France, as if they were two
sides of the same coin.
Society does everything it can to humiliate the immigrants, but in the end
it's them who have dignity, whereas the rich Western Europeans are empty.
A little child against a wall is impersonating something. It is not clear if
she is afraid or playing. The camera turns and shows that other children
are staring at her, puzzled. It's a class of deaf children who are
playing at guessing what she meant by her action. We will never know the
answer because the children cannot guess, and the film moves on.
Anne leaves her building and meets Jean in the street. Jean is her boyfriend
Georges' teenage brother and does not want to live with his father anymore.
The camera walks with them down the street until they part.
He needs a place to stay, and she gives him the code to open the door of her
building. Then Jean retraces his steps towards her apartment. On the way he
angrily throws a piece of paper instead of money in the hat that a panhandling
Romanian woman keeps between her legs while she's sitting on a sidewalk.
A black kid, Amadou, sees him and runs after him, demanding that he apologizes
to the poor woman. A middle-aged Arab shopkeeper tries to break up the fight.
The cops arrest the black kid and the Romanian woman. But it is obvious that
the black kid is a nice human being and the Romanian woman didn't bother
anyone. The cause of the trouble and the mean-spirited being was Jean.
Amadou asks the cops to treat him with dignity, but they insist on grabbing
his arms as if he were dangerous. Amadou then resists and they have to beat
him up. (He was arrested unfairly but at least he wanted to maintain his dignity, but that's precisely what the cops wanted to take away from him).
We see Georges' photographs of Kosovo.
A black taxi driver receives a call that Amadou has been arrested.
Anne is shooting a movie in an ugly warehouse. Someone (whom we never see) has
locker her up and tells her that she will never get out alive, that he merely
wants to watch her die. She starts crying.
Jean's father is eating at a table. Jean walks in. The father gives him food.
Then the camera follows him as he walks into the bathroom and starts crying.
Business people are boarding a plane. Cops escort the panhandler to the plane
(she's been deported).
The mother of the arrested boy, Amadou, cries in her African language to the
middle-aged taxi driver. She complains that Amadou, a teacher of deaf
children and a kind man, was beated by the cops.
She only complains that Amadou spends a lot of time with white girls.
The illegal immigrant, Maria, arrives at her hometown in Romania, an
industrial area permanently enveloped in pollution.
While ironing her dress at home, Anne can hear the screams of a child.
Deaf children engage in collective African drumming.
Georges on the phone talks about his Kosovo photos.
Anne walks in and caresses his face.
Jean's father lives in a farm alone.
Elegantly dressed, Anne visits an ancient apartment,
opens a wardrobe's door and finds a wall. They are shooting another scene
of the film. The director is not happy, and asks that the actors replay
the scene. They do it again and the the camera shows it from a different angle.
Over dinner with friends and Georges, Anne discusses the film: it's about an
inspector who investigates a series of murders.
In the same restaurant Amadou, the black kid, is sitting at a table with
a white girlfriend.
Back to Anne's table, they discuss Georges' photos,
and then she finally notices the black kid who had a fight with Jean.
In Romania, Maria gets a ride from an acquaintance. She tells him that she
was a teacher in France and that she came back to Romania because she missed
the children.
Anne walks into her apartment and reads a letter. Worried, she tries to
phone Georges but he is out. She rings the bell of the neighbor, an old lady,
ands her if she wrote the letter. The old lady denies it, as if she didn't
want to have anything to do with it. The letter begs her to help the child
who is abused and whose screams she hears all the time.
Jean's father reads the letter from Jean who has left him.
At a supermarket, Anne talks with Georges about the child who is always
screaming and the letter. As they argue, she tells him that
she aborted while he was away; but then denies it.
Amadou's little brother has been the victim of bullying (another child stole
his jacket).
At the farm, Jean's father kills all his cows.
Another scene is being shot: Anne alone on the stage of a theater, laughing.
Just three people in the audience.
Amadou's sister is a deaf girl (one of the children of the first scene).
She and Amadou talk about her father, who neglects his family.
Georges in the subway takes pictures of unsuspecting peope with a camera hanging on his chest.
Jean's father tells Georges and Anne that he had remodeled the house for Jean.
Now that Jean is gone, he cannot run the farm by himself.
Georges was the first one to leave the countrysde for the big city.
Anne tells him that she just finished shooting a thriller.
He doesn't want to go and look for Jean, nor does Georges.
Anne and her old neighbor attend the funeral of the little child who was always
screaming. They leave together without saying a word, but one can feel the
old woman reproaching Anne for not doing anything and Anne feeling guilty about
it. The old lady, on the other hand, was afraid of getting involved, and denied
having written the letter. Both were cowards.
Georges describes photos from Afghanistan but the film shows us the pictures of
ordinary people that he took in the subway and in the streets.
He reads from his diary.
Maria is about to go back to Paris illegally with a group of other emigrants,
and cries because she feels humiliated and embarrassed by what she has to do.
Anne is swimming in a pool with her husband when their child climbs the
handrail of the balcony and almost falls to his death.
It's a movie that they are watching in the studio while they add their
voices to the scenes.
A car arrives in an African village.
In the subway two Arab punks annoy Anne. She moves to another seat, but one
of the Arab kids insists. She ignores him. He spits on her face. Sitting
near them is the Arab shopkeeper of the first scene: he is the only one to help
Anne. But then they don't exchange a word. She starts crying, silently, alone.
(She didn't do anything to save the abused child, and nobody
does anything to save her. The Arab kid is molesting her openly, but
the white Georges was molesting people too, just surreptitiously, and got
away with it).
The deaf children are drumming outdoors, and their drumming now becomes the
soundtrack for the rest of the film.
Maria is back to the same street but somebody else is panhandling at her
favorite corner (where the two kids had the fight) and, when she picks another
spot, two men send her away.
In another very long shot, Maria passes a subway exit just when Anne is coming
out of it. The camera abandons Maria to her destiny and follows
Anne to her place.
Georges get off a taxi and walks to her same door, but doesn't
know the code and therefore can't get in.
(We keep hearing the children drumming).
A deaf child is making faces and the other children are trying to guess
what he's doing.
La Pianiste (2001), adapted from Elfriede Jelinek's 1983 novel,
summarizes all the themes of the previous films, adding a strong
sexual element.
Erika is a middle-age piano instructor who has three personalities.
At home she is the repressed and oppressed daughter of a possessive mother,
who is constantly jealous of her private life. They scream and fight, but then
they sleep in the same bedroom. At the Conservatory she is the stern and
icy teacher who shows no emotions to her students (a girl, Anna, is giving
everything she can and is terrified by Erika's judgements).
When she is not home and she is not at work, she lets her secret fantasies
go wild: she walks into a porn store, rents a video, locks herself in the
cabin to watch it and smells the napkins that are drenched with the sperm
of previous voyeurs (she's the only woman in the store).
The young, handsome Walter falls in love with her when he sees her perform
at the piano at a private party. He has been learning piano as a hobby not
as a profession, and Erika looks down on him, but he is sincerely enthusiastic.
He is as warm to her as she is arrogant to him.
Walter insists in being admitted to her class and, the first time he gets a
chance, he tells her he loves her. She is arrogant and indifferent, but then
spies on him. She spends the night at a drive-in, watching couples make love
in the cars (feeling an urge to pee, she is almost caught by one of the young
people). When she returns home, she has a major fight with her mom who stayed
up in angst waiting for her.
At a rehearsal, Anna freaks out but Walter cheers her up. Erika is visibly
upset, perhaps jealous. She walks into the cloakroom, smashes a glass and
drops the sharp pieces in the pocket of Anna's coat. As Erika is chatting
with Walter, they hear the scream: Anna has cut herself and is in tears.
Erika feels the urge to pee and walks away. Walter reaches her in the women's
restrooms and kisses her. She lets him do it, and even starts masturbating
him. But then stops suddenly and tells him that she wants him to do things
to her in return for her sexual attentions. Walter is trying to behave like
a lover, but Erika is as cold and matter of factual as usual.
Erika meets Anna's mother, who tells her in tears that Anna cannot play for
two months, and therefore will miss the important recital she was preparing
for. The poor girl, who is ugly and shy, has sacrificed her life for the
piano, and her parents have sacrificed everything to pay for the lessons.
Erika is totally indifferent to the tragedy that she has caused and only
interested in Walter. Anna is living the life that Erika lived (is on her way
to become what Erika is) and Erika feels no compassion for her.
Walter follows Erika to her apartment and then insist to get in. Despite her
mother's protests, Erika locks herself in a room with Walter. Erika hands him
a letter than contains her "desires". It contains the sickest sadistic fantasies
a woman can have, particularly the desire to be beaten and raped in that
house itself, so that her mother can hear it. Erika already bought all the
tools to perform that sadistic ritual, but Walter leaves disgusted.
Erika goes to sleep as usual in her mother's bed, but this time jumps on her
and tries to kiss her on the mouth, moaning "I love you". Her mother is
shocked and disgusted, but assumes that this is a consequence of her stress.
Erika comes to realize that she really loves Walter and for the first time
looks for him. She tells him that she is willing to do anything for his love.
He is still upset, but she unbuttons his trousers and performs oral sex.
Except that at the end she throws up in front of him, and, instead of being
moved by her humiliation, he is even more disgusted by her whole personality.
He insults her and walks away.
But then he shows up, in the middle of the night, at her apartment. He locks
her mother in the bedroom and starts hitting Erika. Then he rapes her, just like
she asked him in the letter, while her mother can hear it. Erika doesn't move,
petrified.
The next day, which is the day of the concert in which she has to replace Anna
at the piano, she packs a knife in her purse. She waits patiently in the
concert hall for Walter to arrive, but, when he shows up, he is surrounded
by his family, so cannot strike. Furious, she stabs herself in the shoulder
and then leaves the concert hall.
Le Temps du Loup/ Time of the Wolf (2003)
Cache` (2005)
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