one of haneke's worst

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"as we have to guess"

Who says we have to guess? The point is NOT to guess. Guessing suggests that there IS an answer, which there is not. He doesn't want us to analyze the fact that the world is coming to an end, he wants us to analyse the way it affects the characters. Time and time again I hear people say that he wants us to guess. This would be arrogant and pretentious of Haneke, which he is not. I especially heard it in discussions of the film Cache "Who made the video tapes?" Does it matter? The fact that they were made is the point, and it is how this affects the characters that is important.

I didn't like it one bit and yet I'm shocked in the aftermath.




Alex

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Movies from haneke I have watched:
- The seventh continent
- Benny's Video
- 71 Fragments of a chronology of Chance
- Funny Games
- Time of the Wolf
- Cache
- Funny Games US (basically the same as the original)
- The White Ribbon

"The acting is good, as usual with Haneke, and the movie does have some shocking scenes (when they kill the horses for example, and the cutting open of the horse), but it lacks build up, which is a trademark from Haneke. It also lacks the long still shot which he employs often in his movies. Temps du loup doesn't have the shock value of Cache, it isn't as gruelling and disturbingly entertaining as Funny Games and it lacks the psychological intention and strong characterization of La pianiste."

I agree with this, but "Time of the Wolf" is the most humanistic Haneke film yet and while it doesn't have all of these elements from his previous films it is the most emotionally compromising. Maybe it didn't challenge me in an intellectual level as much as Cache, or The White Ribbon, but it made me feel like no other. It made me feel like the end of the world is just around the corner, and it actually studies human relations and communications in amidst of this struggle for survival.

Even though it is probably not his best technically, it is my favorite Haneke film. I haven't seen La Pianiste or Code Inconnu though...

It also lacks the long still shot which he employs often in his movies.
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There are a lot of long still shots in this film. Sometimes it seems reasonable and sometimes it seems to be heavy handed art. Not enough substance to keep this film up.

And this movie should have been shot in film instead of video. Although the vid gives it a mystical look, it just doesn't quite nail the realism.

[insert The Big Lebowski quote here.]

I thought this one was great. It's got a large cast for a Haneke movie, and like The White Ribbon, it's about the interactions & community surviving how they can despite the strain looming over them. I wouldn't call it sterile, though if you were to map it along a heart monitor, it would have a rather more even pulse than Funny Games or even The Piano Teacher. I think it definitely works within the canon. 6 Hanekes in 6 days? You put yourself in for a ride there mate...

I was curious to see other opinions, especially of Haneke admirers. I read a lot about Funny Games and decided he is too much like Trier and wants to challenge me and make aggressive statements, rather than just make a movie, a piece of art as it were, so I stayed away from him for a good few years. But eventually I had to see Amour, because of all the praise from mainstream and film-snob friends and I was absolutely blown away.

It took one film for me to realize that the man has a fantastic hand on cinematic techniques and an immeasurable amount of self-control and eye for balance.

He instantly had the potential to become one of my most appreciated directors, so since then, I've been trying to go through his cinematography.

I saw Hidden, which I also thought was a fantastic piece of film-making, regardless of how one feels about the story itself. I saw The Seventh Continent which was a systematic and brutal deconstruction of everything that represents one as a human entity on the face of this reality and while it was a really slow-burner, it becomes much, much bigger as it grows inside you after you see it.

However yesterday I saw Time of the Wolf and today I saw Benny's Video (which I expected to love) and I'm starting to notice a really obnoxious trait in his way of filmic expression.

While in Amour/Hidden/The Seventh Continent I found the ambiguous elements a brilliant touch, as it gave a leniency of interpretation and opinion to each viewer, based on their own psyche and preferential choices, I'm finding that his bull-headedness when it comes to ambiguity doesn't always pan out well for the end product.

I feel that the characters in both this and Benny's Video have a flatness of emotional expression that just doesn't do anything to help the film. It doesn't progress the story, it doesn't define the characters, it doesn't illustrate any psychological underline... they just seem stunted and emotionless. Pointlessly so. It made sens in Amour and The Seventh Continent, because those families were defined in that particular way, it was a case study of that particular type of family. These films however, are about something else and to illustrate that subject, you need characters to drive you emotionally.

I'll put my case in examples. Benny's constant answer to any "Why" question is either "I don't know" or "Just because". For any one who is a human here (hopefully all of you) this doesn't make any sens... the human mind doesn't work this way. Even if you consciously feel like you don't have a reason when you do an action, you always rationalize in retrospective, it's human nature to have that reflex.

In The Seventh Continent her husband gets killed right in front of her... and it's not only her, but none of the kids have any reaction to this whatsoever. There are a number of emotions that could be expressed here, from grief to anger to acceptance or refusal, even repression being a good enough realistic emotion... but they have nothing. It's like they feel nothing at all. This doesn't make any sens within the context and subject of the film. If I'm to care for these people, then I need to know they are human beings, not spiritually dead, emotionally non-existent machine wrecks. Here's the question. Why should I care if they die when they don't?

But at least with Benny's Video there were quite a few saving graces that were done pretty well to warrant it as a film, but this one is a meandering shamble of a movie that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. The apocalyptic dread and tension is not advanced enough to create truly tense situations and what we have is just people sitting at a way-station passing time for two hours... because except the fire-scene at the end and some of the forest shots, the movie isn't even visually worth it. So it's literally just people passing the time. For the longest time I literally thought this was the way-station in Purgatory, with them all waiting for a train that would never come. Which is actually a much better interpretation that would have made the film much better, but which it didn't offer.

There was barely any point being made here. The angry rebellious kid did not express anything, the mother was emotionally dead, the kid was just pushed along back and forth for the ride, and the colorful cast of characters were pretty much interchangeable. Many of them were Romanian (as am I) so I assume, some sort of point was being made about thieving immigrants, and how we are both villain and victim. When the one guy calls the Romanian a Polish person and accuses him of stealing, this shows both that Middle and Eastern European immigrants are known to steal and that they are being profiled and lumped together unfairly. That was one of the rare good touches here, as was the older Romanian gentleman and the character of the actor who also plays in Hidden. But very few and far between.

And finally we reach the girl, who was the only character here with any sort of identifiable complex human soul that tried to actually behave realistically. But because she has nothing to work with, even this doesn't go anywhere. She just tries... and tries... and then the movie ends.

I need to check the films' chronology and I need to see the rest of his filmography, but I wonder if it's a growth thing, where he grows as a director and learns how to better express underlying psychological character traits and reactions (like in Amour or Hidden), or if it's simply that he is incapable of building any other kind of characters or atmosphere, regardless of the story he is telling. This would kind of sadden me.

Definitely the weakest Haneke film, surprisingly weak at that, and a mediocre to competent film overall. I can't expect any of the rest I have to see could possibly be this void of ideas and inexpressive generally. The film told me nothing.

Really excited for the rest though.

Suggestions on which I should take next?


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