Do an Internet search on the film director Michael Haneke, and you will likely conjure an image of a saintly-looking senior citizen with a big white beard who looks like he could play St. Nick at the local mall during holiday time.
Delve into his films, however, and you will discover that Haneke is more likely to portray “Santa Claws” rather than Santa Claus.
That’s because Haneke is perhaps the most consistently envelope-pushing, fright-inducing, crowd-dividing filmmaker on the planet. And he doesn’t even make horror movies. At least, not on the surface.
My first experience with Haneke came about 15 years ago, when a friend in Canada told me about a film he saw called Funny Games. I had never heard of it, so he sent me a VHS copy of the movie. I put it aside, thinking I would throw it in the VCR when I was in the mood for a light comedy, figuring that with a title like that, how could it be anything but.
Boy, was I surprised when the 1997 Austrian film turned out to be something different altogether. The title of Funny Games, I soon learned, was ironic, because here was one sick and disturbing film.
The premise is simple but the, er, execution is anything but. A wealthy Austrian family—mother, father, son and dog—go on vacation in their quaint summer lake house. Enter knocking: two well-dressed strangers in golf threads looking to borrow some eggs. Soon, the duo terrorizes and eventually kills the family, including their pet. While most of the violence takes place off-screen, the film is jarring because of the sense that these guys’ “Funny Games” are for real, and nothing will stop them. Adding to the unsettling nature of the film is that Haneke breaks down the fourth wall by having the thugs occasionally address the audience. He further tests moviegoers’ tolerance for terror by having one of the killers rewind the film to change a key potentially positive plot point.
Needless to say, I never took any more recommendations from that fellow in Canada again. In fact, I don’t think I’ve spoken to him since. Moreover, when Haneke did an English-language, almost scene-for-scene remake of Funny Games ten years later, with a cast that included Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt, I skipped it. Been there, got a t-shirt.
As demented as Funny Games was, it did make me more interested in this diabolical director and his other works. I discovered Haneke, a former film critic, theater and TV director and editor, was born in Berlin, schooled in Austria and made his film debut at the age of 47, with the release of 1989’s The Seventh Continent.
Along with the troubling violence showcased in his films, Haneke often explores themes of voyeurism, friction between social classes and an audience’s uneasy role as spectator to disturbing events that unfold in front of them. Right from the get-go—Haneke was into ruffling feathers and continues to do so today, as evidenced by his latest film. But more on that later.
The seven-disc boxed set The Films of Michael Haneke, offers an overview of his career. In the aforementioned Seventh Continent, an upper-middle class family—mother, father and daughter—live their lives going through the same routine, day in and day out. The monotony eventually affects the young daughter to the point where she fakes blindness. Unable to deal with the situation, the family plans to leave everything and move to Australia. Even in his earliest feature, Haneke provides an unexpected punch towards the finale.
Benny’s Video (1992) is even more in-your-face than The Seventh Continent, and is almost guaranteed to give any audience the willies. The film focuses on the eponymous teen, the son of wealthy parents, whose repetitive watching of a video depicting a pig’s slaughter leads to his murder of a girl he meets at a video store. The motives for Benny’s crime are never made clear, although Haneke points to reasons that may be generational; the kid reads comics, eats junk food, watches videos and listens to heavy metal music.
Also included on the set is 2002’s The Piano Teacher, a film that brought the filmmaker acclaim outside of cineastes who discovered his work at film festivals or arthouses. Also known as The Piano Player, the French-language film stars Isabelle Huppert as a Schumann-loving piano teacher whose pent-up frustrations—about sex, her life, her career, her bizarre relationship with her mother (Annie Giardot)—eventually get the best of her when she has an affair with a brilliant 22-year-old student (Benoit Magimel). While both Huppert and Maguimel received acting awards at the Cannes Film Festival the year the movie was shown there, many audience members—including critics—walked out of its screening, appalled at the revered Huppert’s depiction of her character’s self-mutilating, sadomasochistic actions.
While the response to The Piano Teacher won a larger audience for Haneke’s brand of thought-provoking (albeit unquestionably coarse) type of cinema, it was 2006’s Cache (Hidden) where the aggressively sexual assaults were supplanted by suspense.
Here, the focus is on the host of a TV show about literature (Daniel Auteuil) and his publisher spouse (Juliette Binoche), residing in Paris with their teenage son. Auteuil begins receiving videotapes in the mail containing surveillance footage of their home. The packages become increasingly sinister—some depict Auteuil’s childhood residence—and are accompanied by drawings of a young boy with his throat slashed.
To find out who is behind these packages and get to the crux of the mystery, the host must confront long buried secrets from his past. Like the audience, he’s left to piece together a puzzle that eventually takes over his entire life, and harkens back to a time he had hoped to have forgotten.
While some Haneke followers may have figured at first that the outlaw director had gone “Hitchcock” on them, their anxiety was soon quelled by the open-ended finale that left many audiences baffled, as well as the director exploring some of his favorite themes and new ones, too—like racial tensions, French national guilt and more.
Haneke’s latest, The White Ribbon, has arrived on DVD and Blu-ray, complete with an interview with the filmmaker and a mini-doc on its Cannes Film Festival premiere. The 2009 film was nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography at this year’s Academy Awards, and obtained the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the prestigious Palmed’Or at Cannes. Presented magnificently in stark black-and-white (although it was originally shot in color, then had the color drained), The White Ribbon is set in an idyllic German village right before World War I. The film is told through the recollections of an elderly teacher, who was then in his early thirties and in love with a young nanny. A series of bizarre accidents occur, none of them ever explained; a widowed doctor breaks his collarbone, a farmer’s wife dies in a freak fall, animals are tortured, and a baron’s son is kidnapped. Welcome to Haneke Territory, folks.
Are these incidents linked? It sure seems that the children of a pastor and, perhaps, the members of their church choir, have something to do with them. But when the war erupts, the authorities’ attentions turn elsewhere. The idea that Haneke has come up with—and it’s a bold and powerful one—is that Nazism began with the children of this village and others like them. The setting is beautiful, but the seeds of evil lurk within. While The White Ribbon is meticulously composed and somewhat cold (chilling if you like, a criticism typically levied on Haneke’s movies), it has a haunting quality that often resembles a horror movie. Repression, abused children, uncommunicative relationships and religious hypocrisy are just a few of the factors that play a part in The White Ribbon’s master plan.