"Les quatre cent coupe" (The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut, 1959), La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke, 2001)

For Francois Truffaut, who would have been 84 today, an old post:

Classical and neoclassical French cinema

Francois Truffaut's first feature film Les quatre cent coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) was mainly a reaction to what Truffaut witheringly called the "tradition of quality." Where "quality" films emphasized production value, Truffaut used everyday Parisian locations; where "quality" films used smooth-gliding camerawork and flawless lighting Truffaut used handheld equipment and available light; where "quality" films were mainly literary adaptations of known classics Truffaut drew from his own life and improvised dialogue on the set.

The result was anything but traditional. One gets the impression of a sketchbook filled with doodles by turns funny, tragic, provocative, sad. One gets the impression of quickly filled spaces, of scenes thought up on the spot, of setups executed on the sly and as quickly dismantled (because the director just thought it up, and possibly didn't have the proper permits ready).

Amour (Michael Haneke), Holy Motors (Leos Carax)

Love Never Dies

Amour feels like a film Michael Haneke has been aspiring to do, a Bethlehem he has been slouching towards for years. From the pressure-cooker tactics he applied in Funny Games he has refined his technique to what we see here--two people trapped in a large apartment, struggling to survive.

The style in Funny Games was severe, the story confined mostly inside a spacious vacation house with few exterior scenes, a largely unflinching (if often coyly oblique) camera peering into the different rooms with (except for one brief and startling exception of a gimmick) little comment or fuss. The style in Amour is if anything even more spare, the camera locked down for most of a scene, unwilling (unlike the one in Funny Games) to look away, the staging calling for very little camera movement  or cutting and (again save for a brief sequence) even less fuss.

That exception I feel is unfortunate--Haneke seems to have perfected his grindingly claustrophobic style; to indulge in fantasy no matter how inventive or restrained or even relevant (it's a metaphor for escape, or its impossibility) seems superfluous, even disruptive. The interruption lets us off the hook for a moment, relieves the oppressive atmosphere.

This is a horror story, of course; think of a man torturing his captive wife to death and there's really little difference save this: the torture in my example would have gone on far longer. Haneke has finally come around to telling a story about recognizably ordinary (if affluent--that apartment is huge) people, in this case an elderly married couple; aside from the aforementioned brief flight of fantasy the whole film could be happening to your neighbors in the apartment next door. And instead of anger or sadism the driving emotion here is the eponymous one, expressed in the somehow more appropriate French. 

Much has been written about Emmanuel Riva's performance as Anne, the eloquent depiction of her character's gradually decaying body. I say this is not so much a solo as it is a duet--crucial is Jean-Louis Trintignant's Georges, with his intelligent, all-too-aware eyes. He knows what's happening, he knows what is to come, and the knowledge threatens to overwhelm him. 

Might as well note that Haneke doles out plenty of suffering for both actors--Riva sits in a bathtub naked,  scrubbed vigorously by an unpleasant nurse; Trintignant huffs desperately (not to mention suspensefully and  hilariously) after an intrusive pigeon. You don't know if he is only acting his arthritic limp, or his excruciating attempt to get up off the floor; you only know that it's almost too much to watch. Is the scene necessary? I think so--it shows Georges still able to care for a living creature, though you wonder if perhaps what he really wants is to twist the bird's neck (with Haneke both are possible, perhaps even inevitable)

There is no escape here; no puncturing the plausibility of Haneke's scenario (unlike fellow shockmeister Lars Von Trier, whose scenarios (save in The Idiots) have almost always been implausible, and hence easy to dismiss). This is easily Haneke's most horrifying film because it says that love that is selfless and passionate and enduring is also monstrous. The film shows you (step by step, moment by moment) the how and why of its monstrosity and you can't contradict the case being made, you can only agree with it--perhaps pray it doesn't happen to you.

It's Haneke's best work to date, I think; possibly Haneke's terminal work...after a film like this, what else does he have to say, really? 

Big Wheel


Unlike Amour which lends a kind of stripped-down finality to Haneke's career, Leos Carax's Holy Motors seems more like a thrown-together, extravagantly appointed photo album of all the films he's seen and all the films he's made and all the films he's likely to make--the picture hurls allusions and ideas at you like sparks off a Catherine wheel. It's brilliantly unhinged, liable to go any direction like a runaway horsecart, yet still you sense the presence of the director at the reins, maintaining the illusion of complete abandonment (or is it an illusion of complete control?).

The film can be a metaphor for any number of things: the Shakespearean notion that life is a performance we're always trying to rehearse for (but end up improvising); the conceit that higher powers (Oscar's chauffer Celine (Edith Scob, the mad doctor's disfigured daughter in Franju's Eyes Without a Face) calls a fellow driver "Ectoplasm on wheels!"--are the drivers ghosts or spirits?) manipulate our destiny; the sense that life is a neverending job from which we long to punch out. 

Bits seem contradictory, if not confusing--Celine mentions that Mr. Oscar (Denis Lavant) has nine appointments, nine encounters (if you like) in which he participates, responds to or initiates, either alone or with others. I counted thirteen 'episodes,' not nine: man in 'forest;' banker; beggar woman; motion capture; Monsieur Merde and model; father and daughter; entr'acte with accordion; assassin and double; street shooting; dying old man; Jean; home; limo garage. 

 Celine tells him about the appointments when he's playing a banker so the first two are out; the entr'acte I take to be an entr'acte--outside the narrative; the street shooting is (or so Celine claims) an accident, and so (it's implied) is the encounter with Jean; Oscar confirms that the next appointment after the dying old man is his last, so the garage should not included, which leaves us with--what, seven episodes? Do we consider Monsieur Merde and model two episodes (first half in the cemetery, second in the sewers)? Do we include the entr'acte? Adding to the confusion, the credits have Lavant playing eleven roles (we can take out Mr. Oscar as his meta-persona and the accordion player, but do we count killer and killed?).

Kylie Minogue sings heartrendingly in a vast space that recalls Orson Welles' The Trial and the climax of Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva, both shot in the Gare d'Orsay, both filled with a dark opulence that seems to have inspired this film (her scene was actually shot in the abandoned La Samaritaine department store near the Pont-Neuf bridge, Carax having used store and bridge in his previous Les Amants du Pont-Neuf). Minogue calls herself Eva but her real name (as much as we can ascertain anything in this picture is real) is Jean. When the man she is to meet runs up the stairs he calls out "Jean!"--does this signify that what happens to Jean and her partner is real and not staged, hence Oscar's anguish? 

All very mysterious; doesn't help that one has the nagging feeling Carax is chortling at all the effort being expended on unraveling his tangled web (for the record I believe Oscar's appointment list went something like this: beggar woman; motion capture; Monsieur Merde; father; entr'acte; assassin; assassinated; dying man; home). More profitable, I suspect, to simply sit back and have fun free-associating the metaphors as they flash across the screen--to sit back, in effect, and enjoy the ride. 

Perhaps the closest we come to an explanation for everything (an explanation for anything?) is when Michel Piccoli--in a role Carax wanted to (ah-ha!) play himself--asks an obviously exhausted Oscar: "What makes you carry on?" Oscar's answer: "What made me start. The beauty of the act." 

"Beauty?" Piccoli's Carax-like figure can't resist musing. "They say it's in the eye of the beholder." Pause. Then in a worried tone: "And if there is no beholder?"

3.13.13  

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)

Pure as the driven

Das weisse Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) is Haneke's latest, a glimpse into a past that may have given birth to the sociopathic thugs that terrorized a German family in Haneke's Funny Games (1997).

The film focuses on a town called Eichwald, dominated by three men--the doctor, the pastor, the baron--and whether or not one likes Haneke's work overall, one can admire the coolly understated way he tells their stories and the dozen or so additional tales of the town, how they connect and affect each other.

The doctor (Ranier Block) is a widower, and is having an affair with the midwife assisting him. The pastor (Burghart Klaussner) is a disciplinarian, and punishes his children for the smallest infraction. The baron (Ulrich Tukur) rules with a largely benevolent hand--he helped pay for his workers' harvest festival--but at the same time dismisses his son's nanny for no discernible reason, and has negligently allowed the flooring in his sawmill to rot (as a result, a woman has fallen through and was chewed up by the machinery below). As the film begins, the doctor is riding home on a horse; the horse suddenly stumbles, sending the doctor head over heels to the ground. Turns out someone has stretched a wire between two trees--who, and why?

All this is told by the village schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), possibly the only innocent pair of eyes in the community (his relative obliviousness is an excellent medium through which Haneke filters the town's secrets to us at deliberately timed moments, the same time he provides a kind of contrast to the overall sense of corruption). He is in love with the baron's nanny, and plans to propose marriage to her.

Call it a psychological striptease; Haneke's storytelling has never been more elliptical, or confident. The characters don't quite devolve into caricatures (they often come close--perhaps cross the line once or twice). Some of what happens is undeniably grotesque, but other moments help make the characterization more human--the pastor, for example, reacts with visible feeling to his son's gift of a caged bird (later the bird is horribly mutilated with a pair of sharp scissors); the baron tries in his own blinkered way to do right by his peasants (even if they end up falling through the flooring); you feel the doctor's pain as he struggles to sit up with a broken collarbone (despite the fact that his sins are more immediately terrible).

Haneke and his cinematographer Christian Berger reportedly studied the films of Ingmar Bergman--the default filmmaker when it comes to European guilt and angst and sexual hysteria--especially Bergman's films with Gunnar Fischer (you can see the influence of The Virgin Spring in this, with Bergman's later cinematographer Sven Nykvist channeling the style of Fischer). The bleakness, though, has an architectural flavor, a geometric precision, that's all Haneke.

For one of the film's closing images Haneke seems to have borrowed a shot from Hitchchock's Frenzy (1972) and sent his camera slowly retreating through the heart of the little village, creeping away from a door tightly shut. That's the central image--the motif, if you will--that Haneke has apparently chosen for the film. Shut doors naturally have this ineffable sense of mystery, of menace; shut doors imply secrets, and a camera retreating from a shut door implies secrets we are reluctant to reveal.

As a kind of ominous footnote, news arrives at the village: the Archduke Franz Ferdinand has just been shot. Haneke in interviews has declared that these children will grow up to be adults in the '30s and '40s, that they are basically the generation that grows up to become Nazis, that the sources of Nazism can be found in the film. I'm not sure I'm happy with that interpretation--the Second World War basically grew out of the political and economic mess caused by the First World War. Whatever caused the First World War was in all probability already far along its course by the time the events in Haneke's film have happened.

There's something old-fashioned, determinedly medieval about the film, and Haneke and Berger's gorgeous black and white cinematography emphasizes that sense of the past (at the same time evoking yet another Bergman drama, the 1957 Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal)). I would say this is more Haneke's portrait of personal, relational evil, of evil inflicted face-to-face, motivated by such recognizably human emotions as hatred and lust. The announcement of the Archduke's assassination is also an announcement of the arrival of a new kind of evil, one motivated by the principles of mass production and powered by both the electric generator and the gasoline engine. The film is a reminder--a documentary, if you like--of an evil that has lasted for millennia (and persists to this day); it is also a warning of worse to come.

First published in Businessworld, 7.8.10