The Essential Michael Haneke review

Reviews

Two decades’ worth of hurt from cinema’s smartest sadist…

Nov 4th 2009 By Jamie Russell

It’s no surprise that Michael Haneke is a teacher as well as a director.

With his thick white beard, thin-rimmed glasses and steely-eyed gaze, you can just see the Austrian delivering rigorous tutorials on Hegel and telling you off being late with coursework.

His films have a similar kind of glacial, academic detachment – they are less dramas more essays think-pieces designed to provoke you. He compares them to ski-jumping: “The film is the ramp. After that, you’re on your own.”

It’s a spot-on metaphor. Haneke’s ability to unsettle is key to his cinema’s power. He loves playing provocateur, each movie teasing us into admitting some uncomfortable truths about screen violence, guilt or middle-class anxieties. You don’t watch Haneke for fun.

So what is the appeal of this austere moralist? Mainly it’s his searing, searching intelligence. Too often modern cinema is the sum of common denominators. Haneke’s films are the opposite.

He dislikes Hollywood and is truly concerned about how our addiction to images is divorcing us from any sense of ‘reality’. Speaking in one of the many interviews that accompany this 10-platter boxset he muses, “If I watch nothing but films, even realistic documentaries, I see only images.”

In Haneke’s world people filming other people always leads to terrible events. The blank, unblinking gaze of the camera lens desensitises us. See the goggle-eyed kid in Benny’s Video who murders a girl with a stun-gun while filming the action, or the alienated landscape of 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance.

Best example, though, is Funny Games – presented here in both its original version and note-for-note US remake. It’s a whip-smart j’accuse that points the finger at Hollywood’s attempts to turn murder/rape/ torture into entertainment.

As its preppy serial killers torment both a middle-class family and us, Haneke demands: why are you watching this? The only logical answer to that question is to eject the disc. It’s torture porn given a moral compass – unwatchable but unmissable.

Haneke likes attacking the certain certainties of his middle-class, arthouse audiences. It’s a world ruled by dread and guilt, from Juliette Binoche playing an actress pleading for her life straight to camera in Code Unknown to the unexplained post-apocalyptic landscape of Time Of The Wolf or the family’s suicide pact in his debut, The Seventh Continent. So, the appearance in this boxset of Haneke’s 1997 TV movie The Castle, based on Kafka’s wintry novel, makes sense – both share a similarly bleak vision.

The late Ulrich Mühe (The Lives Of Others) stars as land surveyor K, ground down by inexplicable bureaucracy as he attempts to gain entry to a foreboding castle. Slightly stilted and stage-bound, The Castle is a lesser addition to Haneke’s canon, but a boon for completists.

The filmmaker’s masterpiece is arguably Hidden – though plenty will shout for recent Palme d’Or winner The White Ribbon, obviously not included here. Daniel Auteuil and Binoche (again) play Parisian professionals targeted by a stalker who sends them surveillance-style videotapes of their front door. He’s hidden but so are the characters’ secrets – their patina of bourgeois respectability is shattered when long-buried crimes are unearthed (France’s colonial history in Algeria quietly underpins the movie).

As we watch, Haneke makes us both victim and perpetrator, forced into identifying with a ‘hero’ who’s perhaps really a villain. Such selfinflicted wounds – personal and societal – are one of the director’s recurring themes (see Isabelle Huppert slicing her genitalia in The Piano Teacher).

All the extras here are identical to the previous DVD releases of the films. The exception is an hourlong doc entitled 24 Realities Per Second, which follows the director through shooting and publicising Time Of The Wolf. More impressionistic than definitive, it’s only obliquely illuminating.

Haneke comes across as a stern taskmaster as he bosses his crew over the production schedule or fusses over the projectionist’s too-powerful lamp during a Q&A screening. “In ordinary life I’m quite shy,” he explains, “but during work I’m ruthless. It’s not that I think I have to be, it just comes naturally. I want to see what I have in my head.”

He has weaknesses too, not least of all a dislike of being filmed. Scenes where he deals with TV press and a photographer find him surprisingly awkward and self-conscious.

How ironic that a man so obsessed with the camera’s gaze should be so uneasy on the far side of the lens. But then to be a truly great sadist, one needs to understand what it means to be a victim.