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.

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Arno Frisch in Funny Games 

Anna: Susanne Lothar
George: Ulrich Mühe
Paul: Arno Frisch
Peter: Frank Giering
Schorschi: Stefan Clapczynski
Gerda: Doris Kunstmann
Fred: Christoph Bantzer
Robert: Wolfgang Glück
Gerda's Sister: Susanne Meneghel
Eva: Monika Zallinger

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Production design: Christoph Kanter
Film editing: Andreas Prochaska

Funny Games is Michael Haneke's cold and nasty take on the horror-thriller genre, particularly the home-invasion subgenre in which a psychopath traps a family in their home and torments them. The locus classicus of the genre is probably Cape Fear, in both the original film by J. Lee Thompson in 1962 and the 1991 remake by Martin Scorsese, although there have been plenty of other movies designed to needle our complacent sense that we're safe at home. Haneke's version is effective in that regard, although he takes the suspense a step further by making us complicit in the torture: Paul, the more dominant of the two young psychopaths in the film, breaks the fourth wall to wink and smirk and even talk at us as we watch his plans unfold. At one point, he says to us, referring to the family he's tormenting, "You're on their side, aren't you?" And at the point where, as in a conventional horror-thriller, the family seems to have turned the tables on their captors, he comments, "We're not up to feature film length yet," meaning that the plot must have a few twists to go. And finally, he shows us that we are among his captives: When Anna suddenly grabs the rifle and blows away Peter, the other tormenter, Paul grabs a video remote and rewinds the scene, then gains the upper hand again, leaving the family (and us) at his mercy. In sum, this is a nihilistic film, which Haneke designed to rub our noses in our prurience where violence is concerned. He wanted to film it in the United States, as a kind of statement about American violence, but was forced to make it in Austria. But after the film succeeded and Haneke had built his international career, he was able to remake Funny Games with an English-speaking cast in 2007. More on that version later.

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.  

The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Ulrich Mühe in The Castle

K.: Ulrich Mühe
Frieda: Susanne Lothar
Artur: Frank Giering
Jeremias: Felix Eitner
Barnabas: André Eisermann
Olga: Dörte Lyssewski
Amalia: Inga Busch
Erlanger: Hans Diehl
Pepi: Birgit Linauer
Narrator: Udo Samel

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Based on a novel by Franz Kafka
Cinematography: Jirí Stibr
Production design: Christoph Kanter

There's an odd resonance between Ulrich Mühe's frustrated K. in The Castle and the role for which he's best known in America, the anonymously gray Stasi spy Gerd Wiesler in The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006). Both are trapped in systems not of their making and are given tedious tasks that ultimately prove meaningless: K. to serve as a land surveyor in a village that doesn't want one and is so covered with blowing snow that there's hardly any land to survey, Wiesler to listen in on and try to trap a playwright whose crimes against the state are, if they exist, minimal. Both try to make the best of impossible situations, K. by doggedly persisting in his attempts to communicate with the unseen and unapproachable Castle, Wiesler by doing his job dutifully until its absurdity becomes intolerable. Absurdity is, to be sure, what Franz Kafka's unfinished novel is all about: People in it behave absurdly -- even the protagonist who, in a particularly dreamlike moment, finds himself hiding under a counter with the mistress of the man he wants to meet and having sex with her. Even the people who might help him, like his goofy assistants Artur and Jeremias or the eager emissary from the Castle, Barnabas, only lead him into further frustrations. Michael Haneke has followed the novel's plot faithfully, even to the extent of leaving off in mid-sentence at the point where the dying Kafka abandoned the manuscript. The result is a film both provocative and tedious: There's a scene near the end in which K. is struggling to stay awake, and I found myself fighting slumber, too. But the commitment with which Haneke and his cast throw themselves into a project that itself is a bit supererogatory -- does Kafka's unfinished story really need to be an unfinished film? -- is impressive.

Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)

Emmanuelle Riva in Amour

Georges: Jean-Louis Trintignant
Anne: Emmanuelle Riva
Eva: Isabelle Huppert
Alexandre: Alexandre Tharaud
Geoff: William Shimell
Concierge: Rita Blanco
Concierge's Husband: Ramón Agirre

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Darius Khondji

As someone who knows what it's like to care for a disabled spouse, I commend writer-director Michael Haneke for getting so much right in Amour. Not that accuracy is of the essence in the film: Amour is not a documentary, it's a fiction, and as such needs a shape that lies beyond the depiction of the mundane pains and frustrations of the characters. And that way lie the pitfalls of sentimentality and melodrama, which Haneke mostly avoids, thanks in very large part to the brilliance of his actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert. Are there American actors, or even British ones, who could have performed these roles with commensurate skill, drawn from the depths of experience? Trintignant and Riva are Georges and Anne, retired piano teachers whom we first see at the triumphant performance by one of her former pupils, Alexandre (the real pianist Alexandre Tharaud). Shortly afterward, Anne suffers a mild stroke and submits to surgery to eliminate an arterial blockage, but the surgery leaves her paralyzed on the right side. Georges is able to cope with his caregiving duties, though Anne is increasingly distressed by her disability and by the burden it places on her husband. At one point she tells him that she wants to die. Another stroke then leaves her mostly speechless and virtually helpless, forcing Georges to hire part-time nursing help. Their daughter, Eva (Huppert), has her own life to live, and urges Georges to put Anne in institutional care, which he resists because of Anne's previously expressed wish to die in their home, not in a hospital. Unfortunately, despite inspired performances and mostly sensitive direction, the climax and the conclusion of Amour ring a little false, perhaps because the fictional construct demands a somewhat artificial closure to a film that has felt genuine up to that point. Amour received Oscar nominations for best picture, for Riva's performance, and for Haneke's direction and screenplay, and it won the best foreign-language film award.

Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000)

Each day, Europe seems to become more frazzled, and consequently Michael Haneke's almost 17-year-old film seems more and more prophetic. It's celebrated for its opening sequence: a nine-minute traveling shot that introduces the key figures in its narrative. The actress Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche) finds Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), the younger brother of her lover, Georges (Thierry Neuvic), at her door in Paris. He's hungry, having run away from the farm where he lives with his father (Josef Bierbichler), so she buys him a pastry and gives him the key to her apartment so she can go to an appointment. When he finishes the pastry, Jean, who is a bit of a lout, tosses the empty paper bag into the lap of a homeless panhandler, Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), a Romanian immigrant. Seeing this, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), the son of a cab driver from Mali, orders Jean to apologize. When he refuses, the two get in a fight that's broken up by the police, who then arrest Amadou and Maria, but let the provocateur of the incident, Jean, go. The film then follows the stories of Anne, Jean, Maria, and Amadou, but in a fragmented way: long, disconnected takes that suddenly black out, leaving the viewer to piece together the narrative. It is, in short, a brilliantly maddening film. If I have reservations about it, they have to do with whether such a display of exceptional cinematic technique does service to writer-director Haneke's apparent concern about the disjunctions of European life in an age of immigration and economic globalization. We get to know more about each of the characters, but the effect is aesthetic rather than political, which would seem to be at the heart of Haneke's choice of subject. The performances are uniformly fine, especially by Binoche, who ranges from raw emotion to crisp wit in the film, which depicts both Anne's real life and her work as an actress. We see her acting on the one hand a harrowing scene set in a prison, and on the other an audition for the role of Maria in Twelfth Night, and we long to see Anne/Binoche in both roles.