haneke
i love you michael!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111
Michael Haneke was one of the first directors to introduce me to high art cinema, and I find it ironic that his films are considered high art, the medium typically associated with the upper class, bourgeois society, the very thing he explicitly criticizes
Caché was the first film I watched by him, and honestly, I had little understanding of movies at the time, so I might need to rewatch it, but I absolutely adored how utterly bleak it was. The silent, long shots, and the final long shot ending, which I later learned might be a signature move of his.
I think what I like most about Haneke is his wide range of themes, from a heartfelt meditation on old age and the value of life, and the way Amour questions whether letting go is an act of mercy or selfishness. I absolutely adore Amour. That said, it was really hard to rank the films of a director like Haneke, and many of them feel interchangeable in my ranking.
His range extends to a bleak, silent critique of the wealthy, most prominent in Time of the Wolf and Funny Games, and undeniably there’s a thread running through both: how much the wealthy take their wealth for granted, how it seems to solve all problems and make life easier, until, on your way to the vacation house you own, you stumble upon a stranger who shoots you mercilessly five minutes later. This is life, in truth: we are no more than animals when social hierarchies collapse. The law of the jungle applies, it’s just that humans have taught themselves to live in “civilized” societies. But when push comes to shove, when the unexpected actually happens, when the situations that intrude your thoughts, the ones you brush away as things that could never happen actually happen, no piece of paper is going to save you then.
Time of the Wolf is, I think, one of his most merciful and heartfelt films toward the bourgeoisie, because it is a genuinely moving, devastating story about human unjustness, cruelty, and survival. I think it’s a reminder that the bourgeoisie are in this too: they are subjected to life’s unfairness as much as anyone, they too suffer, they too are subjected to the human condition. Their flaw is how careless they can be, how they take so many things for granted when what got them to their social status in the first place is, more often than not, luck and inheritance.
While Time of the Wolf acknowledges this side, Funny Games is an absolutely relentless, unflinching shout of anger at that attitude, from the very first seconds of the family in their luxurious car, listening to high art classical music, while the outside world is characterized by heavy and messy metal music.
Then there’s Happy End, which I personally consider a very underrated masterpiece. It explores the rot beneath the facade of a perfect wealthy family while simultaneously handling themes of race and migrants. No matter how wealthy or perfect a family paints itself to be, no human walks this earth without having done ugly, heinous things to differing degrees. And perhaps wealth motivates people to go beyond what they already have. A lot of people spend their entire lives chasing a higher paycheck, and sometimes it leads them to very ugly places. I find this echoes the idea that when you already have everything, there’s only one thing left to feed an everlasting greed: transgression, an idea also present although handled differently in The Seventh Continent.
And although many people discredit Happy End because it offers mostly nothing new and cycles around themes already explored by Haneke (I mean, he literally uses one of the characters from Amour), I still appreciate it as a director’s final vision and I find it a plausible achievement to pack so many themes into a feature film under two hours without it feeling like a cluttered mess.
There’s one sort of trick that I noticed Haneke loves employing when exploring themes of migrants and the lower classes in general. Most prominent in Happy End, Time of The Wolf and somewhat in Funny Games, is this: they’re portrayed from the lens of the subject he’s criticizing, the upper class. They often lack any background, or even names sometimes. Some might find this reductive but personally I find it a smart way to, in parallel, reflect on the ignorance of the privileged while having the disadvantaged unmistakeably present on screen.
Though it is a bit different in Time of The Wolf because all of the characters completely lack any sense of background and I think this was a deliberate choice that echoes the idea that when push comes to shove, where you come from doesn’t matter. It’s a matter of whether you can survive the unexpected. It also fits with Time of The Wolf being the most “humanistic” take of the bourgeoisie among his films.
Honestly, when I started writing this I didn’t expect to spend so much time on just one theme of his, but it’s prominent across so many of his films.
Although watching The Seventh Continent was slightly tedious, it’s one film I always find myself reflecting back on. It might be his most carelessly bleak film. The first two parts, which cover the majority of the runtime, spend their entire duration showing just how mundane the family’s life is, and that’s kind of the point. Like I said earlier, a bourgeois family that has everything possesses few opportunities to experience the new, which leads to the family’s transgressive final act, one their daughter gets caught in the middle of.
Funny Games is brilliant because it simultaneously explores two themes Haneke has always been fascinated with. One of which being the depiction of violence as entertainment in media which is an idea explicitly portrayed in his earlier Benny’s Video
It is a privilege to watch Funny Games specifically because one is getting into it with the mindset of watching a typical narrative film with a clear storyline. The desensitized luxury of taking it for granted that home invasion films are often conclusive. They make sense, they offer a comforting resolution. That violence in fiction has always resolved clearly, that it’s a fictional violence, detached from the real world and more ‘enjoyable’ than the real thing. And just by the second you think this film is one of them, it completely stops making sense.
The two themes of violence in fiction and a satire of the bourgeoisie aren’t entirely disconnected. What holds them together is that the audience falls into the same mistake as the bourgeoisie: taking it for granted that life, for the bourgeoisie, and fiction, for the audience, are both supposed to make sense.
There’s also a thread that feels detached from the rest of his work: a film not often talked about in relation to Haneke, probably because it’s an adaptation, but his handling of Erika’s character was masterclass with Isabelle Huppert’s iconic performance. In just about two hours, he managed to portray a shocking, transgressive story about the effects of repression and a problematic mother-daughter relationship, which anchors Erika’s character. The Piano teacher will always hold the number one spot for me not necessarily because I think it’s Haneke’s best work but it’s a highly personal film to me. This goes for a lot of the ranking decisions here, it’s mostly personal.