Friday, March 28, 2008

Enter a Michael Haneke film at your own risk!

Even if you do not recognize the name, you most-likely encountered Austrian director Michael Haneke early last year with his much-debated 2006 French-language feature Cache ("Hidden"), which is still generating conversation at many a dinner table, thanks to its second life on DVD (and thanks to an increasing number of foreign film lovers who have permanently foregone a trip to the movie theater in favor of passively waiting to update their Netflix queue -- shame on you people!).

That film was thought-provoking and challenging in the way it implicated you, the audience -- you know, the guy who just plopped down $10 to be 'entertained' -- in this upper class couple's voyeuristic nightmare. Just who the culprit was in this scheme to destroy this man's unexamined life is endlessly debatable.


My first foray into this Austrian director's ouevre was 2001's excellent The Piano Teacher starring the wondrous Isabelle Huppert at her depraved and debased best. Nobody does debasement better than Isabelle! (The European title, "La Pianiste" may have lead to confusion with Roman Polanski's contemporaneous "The Pianist." Both films stand on their own as exceptional works of art.)


Haneke's latest -- Funny Games -- a shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 Austrian feature of the same name, and his first effort in English -- does not so much provoke conversation as it provokes violent reactions from film critics. Just listen to these blurbs: "soul-grinding;" "ponderous nihilism;" "a grueling ethics exam;" "a perverse kind of cinematic sadism;" and "a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality." (If that's not a Thumbs-Up, I don't know what is!!)

As a committed fan of the lovely Naomi Watts, I feel an added discomfort witnessing the physical and emotional violence she (her character) is subjected to in this movie (even though, as executive producer, she has no one to blame but herself!). As brave and unrelenting as is her performance, this is not an actor's movie: her performance is subsumed by the director's mission: which is to browbeat the audience into admitting its culpability in today's culture of violence.



Isn't she pretty?


The movie intentionally offers no succor to the audience for witnessing this unrelenting violence--no justice, no vengeance, no tidy resolution that moviegoers come to expect--even demand--from their filmed entertainment. Haneke's point is precisely that: this is not entertainment, it should not be entertainment, and their is no redeeming social value to its depiction on screen. At its best it harkens to A Clockwork Orange in its amoral, unrelenting depiction of violence. At its worst, you want to say, "Okay, I get the point: shame on us for expecting to be 'entertained' by this. Now, what else do you have to say?"

Funny Games works more as a polemic than it does a movie. In other words, you can sit back and think "I understand the point he is trying to make" but you still have to sit through a very uncomfortable 110 minutes of movie. Not that the violence is any more 'gratuitous' than any other depictions of violence we have come to expect from our movies. But one questions the effectiveness of his diatribe if, as in my screening, the people he is trying to reach have walked out at precisely the moment he begins to make it extremely uncomfortable for the audience. [For those of you in the know, my reference is to the 'cat in the bag' game.] So for the rest of the movie, Haneke is preaching to the converted: i.e., those adventurous movie-goers who want to be challenged, provoked, but not necessarily 'entertained.'

Two effects he uses to drive home his point: 1) he never actually shows the violence that is committed in this film; and 2) he deliberately denies the audience any cathartic release one expects from a piece of entertainment: no vindication, no justice, no release from the violence you have just witnessed. Much is made of Haneke's "breaking the fourth wall" (four times by my count). Even more shocking than that, but less-discussed, is his breaking the taboo of depicting violence against children. That is what turns most people against this movie.

Don't confuse Haneke's movie with those films that spend 90 minutes wading in the excesses of violence-as-entertainment, then tacks on a morally-superior "Shame on you for enjoying this" message at the end. [The most-recent example of this: 2007's The Kingdom.] Other critics have gone so so far as to mistakenly lump it into the category of "high-toned torture porn with an edge of self-righteousness." This is not even in the same universe as the pornography of movies like Hostel, David Edelstein (you idiot!)! Even if you detest his movie, Haneke is not a 'fraud' (A.O. Scott).

The last film I remember being this uncomfortable to sit through was the disturbing-to-the-point-of (almost)-unwatchable rape scene in French enfant terrible Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2003). Is an unwatchable film worth watching? Absolutely. Irreversible made my "Top Five Foreign Films" list that year (with a strong caveat to my more sensitive readers).

[Sidebar: FFG still does not have the guts to sit through the ultimate expression of this genre -- the pinnacle of the unwatchable film: Italian master Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious "Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom" (which, the last time I remember it being shown publicly, the manager of the Dobie Theater in Austin was threatened with child pornography charges! And this was in liberal AUSTIN!!).]

A film with the guts to force its audience to face the unfaceable -- that base instinct that draws us to hear every salacious detail of the latest rape-torture-murder victim on cable news -- the same instinct Hollywood has relied on to make hits of 'Death Wish' to 'The Brave One' to the various incarnations of Hannibal Lechter, not to mention every slasher film churned out by Hollywood since Roger Corman first picked up a camera.


Does that make "Funny Games an enjoyable experience? Not in the least. (Nor is it supposed to be). Does it make it a worthy counter-point to the dominant culture's (i.e., America's) obsession with violence-as-entertainment? Absolutely.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

NEW YEAR, NEW BLOG!

My traditional post-Oscar hiatus from movie-going (and thus blogging) was rather long this time (another testament to the great movie year that was 2007...I was spent). But I'm back, baby! With a new outlook (but the same baadasss attitude).
A recent trip to the vibrant city of Chicago took me to the Gene Siskel Film Center on State Street -- Valhalla for the foreignfilmguy. (I take that back: Cannes, the Oscar ceremony, or even Sundance would be Valhalla. But the SFC is a shrine on par with Manhattan's Film Forum or the Anthology Film Archives, at least). The 11th Annual European Union Film Festival was beginning a month-long run. I have fond memories of seeing some great foreign films courtesy of the EU: first at the AFI theater in the Kennedy Center (Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie); then at the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, MD (Antares from Austria is the only one that comes to mind).

Much as I love Houston, we just don't get that quality of film 'down here.' In fact, the bleak art film scene has gotten bleaker (the Greenway 3--R.I.P.; Rice Cinema -- a shell of its former glory days). So rather than waste my time with the increasingly irrelevant WorldFest Houston -- longest-running film festival in the U.S. (only God, the Devil, and Hunter Todd knows how it survives!) -- and the smattering of mediocre French comedies that penetrate the market, I am going to devote 2008 to seeking-out the top-of-the-line indie and foreign films. If that takes me to Austin, Seattle, San Fran, or the mean streeets of Manhattan, so be it!! More likely, it will take me to NetFlix -- plus, I want to do more reading, so I can contribute to my second blog, www.goodreads.com.

An aside about Chicago:
I had a genuine a celebrity sighting at the Art Institute of Chicago!! I had just spent two wondrous hours in the joint Winslow Homer watercolors and Edward Hopper exhibits, and who was buying a ticket as I was leaving? The lovely Heather Graham (Swingers, Boogie Nights, Gray Matters, From Hell, Scrubs...I could go on). Regrettably, I didn't say anything to her. What could I have said: "Loved your work in 'Emily's Reasons Why Not.'?" (That is a 100% true statement, btw, but I did not want to sound sarcastic). She looked as beautiful in person as an actress with a faded AC/DC T-shirt and furry boots can look!
I hope you loved Edward Hopper as much as I did, Heather!!









Two outfits -- one pose!


Back to the purpose of this post: My 1st Review of 2008!

Francis Ford Coppola's return to filmmaking in Youth Without Youth:
I went into this movie blind: not knowing the story, the source material, or the critical reception it received. But I still had expectations: somehow I thought I'd have a David Lynchian-Inland Empire experience. Instead, what I saw was rather tame and literal. True, the 'literal' plot takes off in wild and imaginative directions--hallmarks of a typical Eastern European author upon which this work is based. [Aside #2: this is the second movie I can remember based on a novella that is interminable!! What's up with that? See (or better yet, don't see) Away From Her.]

It starts as an intriguing story of an intellectual who gets struck by a lightning bolt that returns him toikok youth so he can finish his life's work (well-acted by Tim Roth as both an old man and a young one). Yet the two-hour, six-minute movie gets bogged down in a conventional yet ridiculous Nazi subplot: it is not enough that the Nazis are 'bad', they are badly acted, too. (The young Nazi seductress invites comparisons to Sofia Coppola in her looks -- a good thing; and in her acting--not a good thing). While I'm making comparisons, Roth's love interest in the movie (Alexandra Maria Lara) is a cross between Kate Winslet and Keira Knightley--not a bad cross!

I could live with the retro style of the film if it strived to be a straight action movie (like last year's Black Book) or a straight homage to the Golden Age of Movies (like the superior The Good German, which it consciously evokes on more than one occasion). But Youth refuses to play anything straight. It meanders wildly from one style to another, as the story meanders from Romania, to Switzerland, Italy, India, then finally Malta. [I cannot say I've seen many movies set in either Bucharest or Malta, so that is a nice diversion!] By this point, however, I've lost all interest in the plot, so I have to make do with the scenery.

Coppola is still a master, but as with One From the Heart, I question his choice of material to devote his considerable talents. I imagine that's how fans of director Darren Aranofsky felt coming out of his latest, The Fountain (which I purposefully skipped, even though it starred Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman).