Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Bernard Le Coq, Walid Afkir, Lester Makedonsky, Daniel Duval, Nathalie Richard. Screenplay: Michael Haneke. Cinematography: Christian Berger. Production design: Emmanuel de Chauvigny, Christoph Kanter. Film editing: Michael Hudecek, Nadine Muse.

Caché is one of those films I want to like more than I really do. It's a thriller without a payoff, somewhat in the mode of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960) in that it's a mystery that doesn't get solved. But Michael Haneke is a colder, more cynical filmmaker than Antonioni, so that I can never quite shake the feeling that Haneke is just toying with us, parading themes like deception and guilt before us without having anything particularly revealing to say about those topics. On the other hand, we live in an age of increasing invasions of privacy, when the technologies we depend on seem to betraying our secrets to the world, so Haneke's film may have an element of prescience to it. The premise is this: a couple, Georges and Anne Laurent, played with their usual edgy brilliance by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, receive a videotape that's simply a record of the façade of their house during several hours of what seems to be random day. It's a premise that David Lynch used some years earlier in Lost Highway (1997), but where Lynch expanded from that into a florid nightmare of a story, Haneke simply traces the slow effect of that enigmatic tape on the Laurents, who are initially unsettled by it but not particularly concerned. And then more tapes arrive, some wrapped in childlike drawings that have a more sinister effect, and the Laurents begin to worry. Is it a threat, a kind of terrorism, or is it just a prank, played perhaps by one of the friends of their teenage son, Pierrot? Eventually, Georges realizes that he is the primary target of this strange harassment, and that the perpetrator is someone who knows about something that happened when Georges was only 6 years old. The confrontation with the man he suspects is responsible for the tapes proves calamitous, made worse by Georges's initial attempt to keep the truth from Anne. Still, at the film's end, there is no real resolution: We may suspect we know the truth, but Haneke never gives us certainty. It's a film that provokes analysis, but I'm not convinced that it entirely deserves it.

Happy End (Michael Haneke, 2017)

Fantine Harduin and Jean-Louis Trintignant in Happy End

Anne Laurent: Isabelle Huppert
Georges Laurent: Jean-Louis Trintignant
Thomas Laurent: Mathieu Kassovitz
Eve Laurent: Fantine Harduin
Pierre Laurent: Franz Rogowski
Anaïs: Laura Verlinden
Nathalie: Aurélia Petit
Lawrence Bradshaw: Toby Jones

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Christian Berger
Production design: Olivier Radot
Film editing: Monika Willi

When does style become mannerism? I think it has happened to Michael Haneke in Happy End, a chilly and detached look at a wealthy, dysfunctional family. Haneke's previous film, Amour (2012), showed signs that he was able to transcend his impulse to show off with the camera and to cast a cold eye on his characters; there was real feeling in the relationship between the elderly couple in that film, and Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva filled them with life and its consequent pain. But in Happy End, Haneke is so remote from his characters that even actors as skilled as Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert can't quite make them work. Trintignant comes closest: As the patriarch of Happy End's Laurent family, he allows the aging Georges Laurent to show some tormented humanity, even though it's masked by cynicism. But Haneke also resorts to manipulating the camera to try to make sure we're never deeply involved with anyone in the film. When Pierre, Georges's grandson, tries to make things right with the family of a construction worker injured in an accident at the site of one of the Laurent family's projects, he goes to the apartment building where they live, but is badly beaten by the worker's son. Haneke decides to film the entire incident at a distance in a single long take. We watch from the street as Pierre enters the courtyard, rings a bell, waits for the man to come to the door and talk for a while with Pierre -- we're too far away to hear their conversation -- before the man erupts into violence; when the man is gone, Pierre picks himself up and drags himself painfully back to the street, where a passing woman asks if he needs help. Admittedly, there's a tension in the scene because we don't quite know what's going on -- at this point we're not even entirely sure who Pierre is --  but it also feels mannered in execution, a tour de force for its own sake. The world of Happy End is a fallen one, which Haneke makes explicit by calling a key character Eve. She's the daughter of Georges Laurent's son, Thomas, but Thomas and Eve's mother have separated and she barely knows her father. Eve opens the film by spying on her mother with her cell phone camera, leaving text messages on the screen showing her contempt for her mother. Before long, Eve has gone to live with her father and his new wife after poisoning her mother with an overdose of prescription medications. And by the end of the film, Eve is perfectly willing to help Georges, her grandfather, commit suicide. This is the stuff of either melodrama or black comedy, but Haneke plays it with such remoteness that it winds up being neither -- or perhaps both, which is unsettling. For those who like to be unsettled, that may be enough, but despite some well-executed scenes throughout the film, it wasn't enough for me.

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, and Benoît Magimel in The Piano Teacher

Erika Kohut: Isabelle Huppert
Mother: Annie Girardot
Walter Klemmer: Benoît Magimel
Anna Schober: Anna Sigalevitch
Mrs. Schober: Susanne Lothar
George Blonskij: Udo Samel
Gerda Blonskij: Cornelia Köndgen

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke '
Based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek
Cinematography: Christian Berger

Michael Haneke's cinema of cruelty reaches its apex (some would say nadir) in The Piano Teacher, which becomes an almost definitive vehicle for Isabelle Huppert's ability to create terrifying women. In that regard her performance surpasses even the murderously manipulative Jeanne in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995). The Piano Teacher's Erika Kohut calls to mind the masochistic Michèle Leblanc in Paul Verhoeven's Elle (2016), which earned Huppert the Oscar nomination that should have gone to her for those earlier films. The Piano Teacher resembles Elle in that both Erika and Michèle are masochists, the product of horribly dysfunctional families: Michèle's father was a mass murderer, Erika's died in a mental institution. But Erika is the more intricately fascinating character because she is devoted to the beauty of her art, releasing her pent-up sexuality in private acts of self-mutilation, watching pornography, and voyeurism -- there are drive-in movie theaters in Vienna? who knew? -- whereas Michèle has channeled hers into creating video games full of violent images. It's the disconnect between the beauty of Schubert and Schumann and Bach that fills the film's soundtrack and the ugliness of Erika's desire for self-degradation that gives Haneke's film its essential tension. To be sure, she takes out her frustrations on her students, cruelly mocking them in her attempts to make them live up to her musical ideals, but it's only when she finds a man who can challenge her own desire to dominate that she approaches fulfillment. Walter Klemmer is younger than she; he's handsome and athletic and smart, and he has the kind of musical talent that potentially matches her own. The masochist thinks she has met her potentially equal sadist. It's in her attempts to convert Walter's otherwise conventional sexuality into something as dark and damaged as her own that she encounters her limits, becoming the failure that her horrendous harpy of a mother has continually called her. None of this is a lot of fun: The Piano Teacher is one of the least erotic films about sex ever made. Haneke has jettisoned the backstories of Erika and her mother that were apparently supplied in Elfriede Jelinek's novel (which I haven't read), leaving us to speculate on how mother and daught wound up in a relationship in which they are slapping and yelling at each other one moment, then cuddling in a shared bed the next. But Haneke is not an explainer; he's content to show, not tell. And that often gives his films a visceral quality that makes them as fascinating and provocative of thought as they are unpleasant.