Amour

Michael Haneke, cinematic sadist extraordinaire, may have crafted his ultimate iron maiden in Amour. After years of random brutality, films filled with mutilations of the self and the other, the director has at last discovered the greatest horror show of them all: time and our own crumbling bodies. Not that there aren’t signs of a newfound tenderness occasionally breaking through the misanthropic gloom of Haneke’s world. When Jean-Louis Trintignant dodders around an apartment trying to capture a pigeon, one reflexively cringes at the inevitable violence to come (visions of a dead bird a la The White Ribbon flutter around the imagination). Instead the old man simply holds the creature, caressing it sadly before later setting it free—and unless he released it into a turbine, the bird may be one of the first animals to survive a cameo in a Haneke film. Elsewhere, the director’s clinical touch is evident, bolstered by two superbly considered performances from his octogenarian all-stars, Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. When Riva looks through a photo album and declares life to be beautiful, the moment is so drained of sentimentality it makes the weather report seem overwrought. Too bad all of the fine efforts of the actors are torpedoed by Haneke’s predictable fondness for sudden, shocking bursts of violence. As always, he confuses surprise for genuine emotion and assumes making people squirm is the same as making them think. Even in his supposed humanist crowd-pleaser, Haneke can’t resist sucker-punching the audience.

Cold Weather

Aaron Katz established his talent with a pair of low-key efforts about youths adrift in a sea of suburban anonymity: the charmingly simple love story Quiet City and the more troubled Dance Party USA, which is perhaps what a Michael Haneke movie would look like if it were performed by a high school drama class. Cold Weather, Katz’s third feature film, ingeniously extends his world without compromising it. The same drifting, dislocated youths are in evidence here, only this time they seem to have drifted their way into a Raymond Chandler novel.

However, in the place of a hardboiled hero we must make do with a doughy slacker. Doug lives on his sister Gail’s couch after dropping out of college, giving up the study of forensic science to spend his days shuffling bags of ice around in an ice factory. Unable or unwilling to commit to the drudgery of a career, he discovers the drudgery of a livelihood instead. He’s the perfect example of an aimless twenty-something unable to decide what to do with himself—the film makes a running gag out of him goading on his friends and sister to ditch work, much as he often does.

Early scenes focus on Doug and his slim social circle goofing off and hanging around. Indeed, the film may be unique in dedicating a montage sequence to a board game party (rather appropriately, it ends with the characters trying to decipher the instructions). But the story soon takes a sharp left turn into thriller territory, as Doug’s ex-girlfriend blows off a date with a mutual friend and seemingly disappears. Egged on by his friend Carlos to tackle the mystery—“You know about these kind of things,” Carlos explains—Doug indulges his love of Sherlock Holmes and puts his unfinished detective courses to use. From there, the usual hardboiled details begin to crop up, including pornographers, secret codes, and the requisite briefcase full of money.

Katz is clearly having fun riffing on detective stories here, but the film can’t be so easily pigeonholed as some genre parody or mishmash of mumblecore mannerisms with thriller tropes. Self-conscious films like this typically display their artificiality, not their naturalism. Yet Katz ignores stylized gestures, rather hewing to his well-established mode of quiet urban contemplation and small, personal moments. Even the relationships between the characters have an easygoing realism that doesn’t appear normally in hardboiled dramas. A stylish drama devoid of style and drama, the film becomes something far stranger and more rewarding: a collection of offhand character observations, delivered with warmth and intelligence.

One sees this especially in the relationship between Gail and Doug, a beautiful slice of sibling interaction. There are no long-buried hatreds and jealousies, no recriminations and shouting and hugging and sobbing and all that sticky nonsense. Instead, there are simply fond jokes, flashes of shared memory, and the staple of any sibling bond, embarrassment. The best—and perhaps most representative—moment in the film comes when Doug buys a porn magazine, explaining to Gail that it might contain clues. Her response? A simple, withering, “Oh.” There’s an entire conversation in that one word, with all the bantering and teasing of their years together boiled down to a single, deadpan syllable.

The fact that the primary male-female relationship in the film is not sexual, but rather familial, colours the proceedings in striking ways. We’re never really drawn into a sordid underbelly of crime and depravity, even when shady pornographers start popping up. Instead, Katz discovers a childhood game buried inside the sometimes-dreary lives of these young adults. The film feels like a group of kids playing dress-up in their backyard. Like a child imitating the grownups, Doug buys a pipe, just so he can sit around smoking and thinking as Sherlock Holmes would. Even Gail dresses up in a disguise at one point, although, apropos for this ramshackle adventure, it’s one cribbed from a lost and found.

All of this probably sounds terribly slight, even if one can’t underrate the film’s affectless charm. But Katz understands something crucial about genre that is often missed by other referential filmmakers mining familiar territory for fool’s gold. As a director who has cultivated his own filmmaking family over just a few projects, Katz is attuned to the pleasure in simply watching a group of friends create their own story together. The interactions of the characters always take precedent over the rehashed genre plot. So it should come as no surprise that the mystery of Cold Weather falls away in the last moments, leaving us once again with nothing other than the sibling bond we began with. Rather than resolution, Katz settles for a little flicker of insight into Doug and Gail’s relationship. As with a mix tape shared between friends, the quality of the song is secondary to the moments and memories conjured up by the familiar tune.

The White Ribbon

(When I initially reviewed The White Ribbon at the Edmonton International Film Festival, I found myself enjoying it, despite my reservations. Yes, it was a bit of a bloated, self-important piece of white elephant art, but it was also well made and engrossing. Amid all the dead termites of the EIFF, a robust white elephant starts to look pretty appealing, you know? On the occasion of the film’s theatrical run, I’ve decided to revisit it in more depth and give it the proper shit-kicking it was due.)

“I feel like I should see Slumdog Millionaire,” the man said, “just so I can fulminate against it.”

The scene was a Michael Haneke retrospective, moments before beginning a perilous exploration of The Seventh Continent, the director’s dour first feature film. The speaker was a local film studies professor—an excellent and insightful man, in fact—chatting with someone in the audience as we waited for the film to start. And while I appreciated the professor’s healthy distrust of Slumdog Millionaire (which I shared, incidentally, and which would be ratified when I finally saw that film myself), I was also struck by how disconnected we all were at that moment. Sitting in a near-empty theatre about to watch a 20-year-old film scold the modern world for being shallow and numbing—that’s a pretty comfortable spot from which to hold the plebeian masses in contempt for what they’re doing for fun on a Friday night.

In its clinical depiction of a middle-class family losing its collective mind, destroying its possessions, and then committing suicide, The Seventh Continent is in many regards a masterpiece—a masterpiece of control, of method, of concision. It is utterly precise and unflinching in cutting the heart out of its subjects, and lord is it smug. The film exudes condescension towards the spiritually impoverished, culturally bereft middle-class world—a scene of the family watching Meat Loaf sing on television is held up as exhibit A—and the surface of that world unsurprisingly begins to shrink out of view from these lofty heights of disgust. And exhibit B could easily be Slumdog Millionaire.

But perhaps it is time to put the judge on trial. By engaging so freely in oversimplified scorn and flattering the sophistication of its audience, The Seventh Continent is no less pandering than the easily derided crowd-pleaser. The worst impulse that Haneke provokes in any audience—which I contend with even as I admire his often impressive cinematic mastery—is the sense that we are above the subjects, not watching our own lives laid bare but rather witnessing some contemptible strangers. Anyone willing to enter this audience is allowed to share in that same superiority towards banal middle-class existence, and the more people outside the walls the better. The Seventh Continent is a devastating film, and it only grows in power as its audience shrinks.

What then can we make of The White Ribbon, Haneke’s latest film, anointed with a Palme d’Or at Cannes and Academy Award nominations in Hollywood? With its historical subject matter, immaculate black-and-white visuals, and somber sense of import, the film seems poised to achieve the middlebrow respectability denied more punishing curios like The Seventh Continent. Certainly, Haneke has strained against the limits of his audience before, as evidenced by his American remake of Funny Games, the fourth-wall tapping essay on cinematic violence that originally helped make his reputation on the international scene. The White Ribbon may simply represent Haneke’s latest strategy for sneaking in front of a larger audience, all the better to display his contempt for their lack of taste and intelligence (excusing, of course, their willingness to see his films).

Consider me skeptical. Haneke has never been the sort of filmmaker you bring home to mother. This is a man whose most famous thesis statement is the remark, “I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.” At first blush, this might sound like the talk of an uncompromising provocateur, but you could just as easily reply that anything where both parties are willing can’t really be called rape (there are all sorts of funny games played between consenting adults).

More importantly, how can any plausible theory of liberation be built around domination and power? The contradiction in The White Ribbon is that it allows us complete freedom to draw whatever conclusions we want—that Haneke will allow.

Set just before the First World War, the film explores the effect a series of unexplained violent acts have on a small German village. A hidden wire trips a horse, breaking the arm of its rider. A bird is pierced with a pair of scissors. A mentally challenged boy is blinded. Much has been made of the film’s conspicuous lack of resolution—something of a Haneke trademark by this point. In interviews, the director demurs when asked to clarify his intentions by arguing that his explanations would only interfere with the interpretations of the audience. This would make much more sense if the film’s ambiguity were actually ambiguous. We know, on some level, that the children of the village are responsible for these acts, even if the specifics are never established. The conclusions are clear from the start, the unresolved questions strictly rhetorical.

A more traditional resolution would involve the separation of the guilty from the innocent. Haneke sidesteps this simply by making everyone in the town guilty in an abstract, we’re-all-monsters sort of way—except, of course, for the victims and the narrator, none of who display anything less than untrammeled innocence. On the other hand, most of the key authority figures in the town are treated as downright villainous, from the incestuous doctor (also engaged in a self-flagellating Bergmanesque affair with the town midwife) to the fanatical priest who has constructed a neat little hell of guilt and shame for his children. It’s a rather specious ambiguity that can contain so many clean divisions between good and evil.

Only rarely does Haneke find interesting notes to sound in this otherwise monotonous film. The scene where the priest lectures his adolescent son on the dangers of masturbation is genuinely funny, with the solemnity of the characters contrasted with the earnest absurdities being spoken (pustules?). But Haneke ends the scene with a glib cut to the doctor and midwife in mid-coitus—another, more advanced form of sexual shame and self-abuse to be found in the village. There is a similarly snide transition at another point when the film cuts from a sweet, fumbling song played by the teacher to—what else?—a pigpen. All humour and lightness brought down with a burst of brute grunts.

To judge by this film, sexual repression and violent conformity lie at the root of any oppressive fanatical order—well, no shit. Haneke’s analytical distance is supposed to allow us to see reality more clearly, but there are dangers to his method. Pull back too far and the observations become too general, too superficial, and too inconsequential. You cease to comment on life. Unwilling to be swayed by bourgeois concepts like emotion, Haneke follows his rigid thesis from start to finish without learning anything new about his subjects. They run his maze, but what does that prove, other than that Haneke knows how to construct a maze?

In the final shot, we watch the entire town filter into a church at the break of the First World War. Our guide, the teacher, is gone by this point—sent off to war, he tells us in his narration, speaking in a wizened voice that assures us he survived the ordeal. The crowd is surely meant to form a mirror image of the theatre audience watching at that very moment. As we look into that reflection, we are meant to feel dread and contempt at the wicked, wicked masses that have built such a cruel society. But that old superiority comes flooding back in. We see ourselves as the teacher, someone innocent and aloof, not part of the crowd, but somewhere far away, safe and distant.

EIFF: Days Seven and Eight

Fair warning: this is a pretty dire post. Three films, only one keeper, and that by Michael Haneke no less, which is a bit like saying the best part of your vacation to Singapore was the caning.

Enter if you dare. I'll try to remember to go see some good films tomorrow.

Those Three

I'm struggling with how to summarize this one. Maybe try to imagine a version of Andrei Tarkovksy's Stalker that is somehow half the running time and yet feels twice as long—that captures some of the stultifying power of this film, which often does feel like a clumsier version of Tarkovsky's mystical wonders. Better yet—how about a humourless version of Waiting For Godot in which everyone dies and then a pregnant woman walks on stage and delivers a baby.

No, wait, that actually sounds kind of fun.

Or at the very least, more fun than this monotonous little Iranian film about three military deserters who wander a snowy plain where they meet a pregnant woman and then die of exposure. Along the way, there are a few other incidents of note—a few squabbles, a random encounter or two, but nothing of great significance. Essentially, we watch three figures wandering an endless white landscape, blotted out by the environment. Aside from the occasional tree, there are no landmarks, just a seemingly eternal, numbing haze.

I suppose writer/director Naghi Nemati is going for a spectral anti-military film in which our three protagonists head off in dangerous terrain rather than stay in the army. They face the inclement world, suffer at its hands and die, while a baby comes into this same cruel environment at the end as a symbol of future hope or continued suffering or—who cares, really? I get bored just writing about this earnest, thoroughly unimaginative attempt to convey so many banal concepts. Never before have I been so conscious of the fact that going to the theatre is nothing more than staring at a white sheet for an hour and a half.

The White Ribbon

I'm a little ambivalent about the films of Michael Haneke. He's undeniably a brilliant director, but his depictions of middle-class alienation often have the feeling of an expert marksman with a barrel of fish. Sometimes I just wish he would apply all that formal rigour of his to something completely outside of his comfort zone instead of gunning down the same easy targets each time.

As it stands, The White Ribbon does seem like a bit of a broadening of Haneke's usual world, however slight that expansion might be. True, this depiction of an Austrian village set just before the First World War is in many ways a typical Haneke excursion into cinematic water-boarding, but there are also surprising moments of tenderness and humour. The narrator, Lehrer, is a schoolteacher who behaves honourably and kindly, without even a trace of the wanton cruelty that defines so many Haneke characters, including a great many of those who populate this film. And I never would have believed people might laugh at a Haneke film unless I heard it myself, but the scenes revolving around a pastor's son discovering the joys of masturbation are surprisingly quite funny.

Of course, this being a Haneke film, the innate cruelty of human society is always lurking around the corner. The little village is rife with inexplicable crimes, including, most gruesomely, the torture and blinding of a young mentally handicapped boy. The mystery unfurls with Haneke's typical commanding grace, and ultimately implicates the entire society (of course), suggesting the seeds of Nazism that lurk in the younger generation will come to bloom because of the willful blindness and cruelty of the older.

Also typical of Haneke are the instances of button-pushing horror, including the aforementioned child mutilation, as well as some gratuitous incest and even a bit of nasty animal violence (the guy just can't give up on his usual cinema of shocks, I suppose, although he does show some admirable self-restraint for most of the film). Still, the black-and-white cinematography is excellent, and Haneke's command over his material is as sure as ever. Even if Haneke's conclusions are pretty much predictable from the start, the unfolding of this plot is still a thing of terrible beauty, and worth beholding.

Pirate for the Sea

Ugh. Now we're really hitting the dregs of the fest. This tedious piece of agit-prop focuses on Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace who went on to form the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an organization dedicated to defending marine life. With their own ship—named for Farley Mowat, who also appears in interviews in the film—the Sea Shepherds attempt to block the Canadian seal hunt and illegal Japanese whalers near Antarctic.

Director Ron Colby gets some suspense from these tense, often violent confrontations, but make no mistake—this is a ham-handed, dull, at times even downright dim-witted documentary. The film takes a fair cause—outside of Ottawa and the Maritimes, who even supports the seal hunt anymore?—and makes it seem almost unlikeable. Watson is surely a charismatic fellow with a powerful sense of conviction, but I like some ambiguity and nuance in my documentaries (or at least a bit of originality or insight), and Colby really has little to offer viewers looking for anything other than a confirmation of their own rightness.

Instead, we get a fawning, uncritical portrait of a controversial figure who could surely provoke more interesting work than this. Pirate for the Sea is a film so unthinking that it can show the crew on the Farley Mowat being warned that if the hull is breached they could easily die, and then later capture that same crew ramming a Japanese whaling ship with a device called "the can-opener" intended to rip open the enemy ship's hull. Yet still Colby allows Watson to claim the moral high ground of having never harmed anyone in his actions, even as the man engages in activities that could result in the deaths of people on both ships. And this doesn't even touch on the disturbing fact that Watson supplied AK-47s to a ranger station on an island conservation area, supposedly for the purpose of warding off illegal fishing. I hate to be a nag, but whatcha gonna do with those Kalashnikovs, Paul? Shoot the fishing nets?

The detail flashes by so quickly you have to wonder if Colby is embarrassed to mention it, or simply doesn't give the matter a second thought. Sadly, the film isn't interested in such contradictions. Instead, Colby settles for broad gestures toward easy sentiments that reveals a failure to employ any rigorous critical attention to his subject, or, for that matter, his craft (the general blandness of the film's style suggest nothing more than a corporate recruitment video). Good intentions don't excuse bad art.