Pianos & Porn.

Have I mentioned today how much I love Isabelle Huppert? No? Well there is no time like the present. And combine Huppert with Michael Haneke - glory.


The Piano Teacher (or La Pianiste) obviously clicked, with the Cannes jury at least - Huppert won Best Actress (her second such recognition from the festival), her costar Benoît Magimel won Best Actor and Haneke won the Grand Jury Prize. Based on Elfriede Jelinek's novel, the film centres around the horrifyingly sexually repressed piano teacher Erika (Huppert) and her relationship... well, with the world around her, manifested in a gifted pupil Walter (Magimel.) Erika, in her forties, lives at home with her mother, even sharing a room. She frequents video rooms in sex shops, even sniffing discarded cum-soaked tissues as she watches. She cuts her genitals while sitting on the edge of the bath, right before dinner. And she is cruel and hard with her students.


She meets Walter, who falls for her cold distance due to her talent with the piano, and some glimmer of humanity and weakness he is able to discern within her. What he doesn't realise, however, is the twisted sadomasochism that takes the form of that weakness. Despite her attempts to distance him, Erika finds herself drawn into some sort of relationship, of sorts, with him, which sees her make public her desires for the first time, much to the horror of Walter. It is only later, when her dreams come true, that she realises how unpleasant they really are.


Huppert is extraordinary. She is always extraordinary, but here... here she is something else. She is so incredibly there, within this horrid creature that she plays, but managing to imbue Erika with the frailty of her own fear and shame. Rather than hating her tormenting ways, from the get-go you feel sorry for whatever has driven our protagonist to this point in her life.


Magimel does a fine job opposite Huppert as the young, beautiful, precocious but ultimately arrogant and unaware student of music. He was good, though whether I'd plant him as the best of the fest I don't know. Having said that, I can't actually be bothered looking up who else was in contention, so we'll let him have it, shall we?


Haneke does his twisted thing so well, and he does it again beautifully here. Erika is a tough cookie, very mean and dark and often shocking, but Haneke, of course, doesn't ever flinch away from showing her, from emoting with her and discovering empathy for her. He's not afraid to open the door to each of our hearts and remind us that, somewhere inside, we are all as desperate as she is. Cinematographer Cristian Berger shoots the film coldly and clinically to match the leading character, the first collaboration between Haneke and Berger before Hidden and The White Ribbon.


Riveting, striking and quite shocking, The Piano Teacher is high on my list of favs of the last decade. Haneke is pretty damn good, and Huppert is pretty damn amazing. 5 stars.

Haneke Love?

I haven't made much of a secret about the fact that I quite like Michael Haneke (see here and here), and it was with a great deal of expectation that I chugged myself off to see his latest The White Ribbon, thrilled to find that it was still playing in cinemas after I somehow managed to completely miss the fact that it released, oh, four months or so ago, despite the fact that I've been hanging out for it since it won the Palme d'Or back in May last year, beating A Prophet down to the Grand Prix (which has got to be one of my favourite films of my hundred odd so far in this marathon.)

The White Ribbon takes place in a small German town in the lead up to the outbreak of WWI. It's quite a difficult film to describe the plot of without either giving too much away, or becoming incredibly verbose. It is effectively a microcosm of society and humanity - there are powerful beings who show heart, innocent beings who (perhaps) show malice, death, love, destruction, hope and sorrow. A pastor is cruel to his children. A baron show sympathy for someone who destroys his crop. A doctor molests his daughter and abuses his mistress. But, in true Haneke style, they all have opposing forces of good or evil playing out within them. And the narrative is plagued by strange, dangerous things happening - a wire strung between trees tripping the doctor's horse as he rides home; the baron's son being strung up and tortured; the pastor's pet bird being impaled. Is it the children?


The film is black and white, shot by Christian Berger, who also lensed Hidden and The Piano Teacher and picked up an Oscar nomination and just took home the ACS award for his work. While much of the work is great, I thought the fact that it was shot colour and then monochromed in post detrimentally affected the quality of the visual tone - the blacks seemed a little brown, the shadows not as sharp as I really think they should have been. I've done this before myself, and I have never thought it looks as good as when you shoot it black and white, so I'm actually a little puzzled as to all the notice... and I should note that I only found out that it was shot colour after making this opinion of the look, so it's not a situation where I went into the film with my opinion coloured (boom boom.)


The acting was fairly fantastic from all of the cast, especially the children, many of whom were quite young. Haneke kept them all in check, reigning them in to fit the familial and social sensibility of the day - emotional externalisation wasn't really the norm in the early 1910s. 


But still... I actually thought when I emerged from the darkened theatre that something might have gone over my head, maybe I don't know enough about European history at the time and there was some important subtext that I didn't understand. This may be the case, or I might not have been paying enough attention to the subtleties, or I might actually just be stupid. But I'm familiar with Haneke's work - maybe that was it. I know I was waiting for something confronting, a shocking scene, that never quite came, and this may have tempered my ability to be overly confronted by what was going on bit by bit, which in retrospect is quite full on.


Actually, writing this now, I really want to see the film again. I'm going to give it 3.5 stars for now, because that's where I'm hovering, but when it hits DVD I'll check it out and maybe my opinion will change. Today, though, I'm hoping for an Audiard win for The Prophet on Sunday, though apparently the smart money is on Argentinean entry The Secret In Their Eyes, which I have not yet seen.

We're Not Up To Feature Film Length Yet.

Violence for the sake of violence. Fear for the sake of fear. Unexplained happenings causing tumult in the lives of otherwise normal people. It's like this is the mandate for the work of director Michael Haneke, or at least the two I've written up on here (Hidden being the other one.) Funny Games (the original, Austrian one, not the 2007 American reboot) precedes Hidden by a good eight years, and it does, visually at least, look rougher around the edges. What they have in common, however, is that desire to unsettle the audience, and to do it by simply not giving them any answers, any motivation.

Couple Anna (Susanne Lothar) and Georg (Ulrich Mühe) escape the city for a holiday at their lakeside home with their young son Schorschi (Stefan Clapczynski.) Shortly after arriving their neighbour appears with a friend, Paul (Arno Frisch), described as a friend, and they help to put out their boat. After they have left, Peter (Frank Giering), another friend of the neighbours, arrives, asking to borrow eggs. After breaking a few eggs and accidentally knocking Anna's phone into a sink full of water, tensions start to rise before Peter and Anna, and she asks him to leave. Paul arrives, trying to calm the situation whilst still getting the required eggs, and shortly Georg and Schorschi return.


The confrontation escalates, with Paul attacking Georg with a golf club before Paul and Peter take the family hostage, making a bet that the three family members won't survive until 9am the following morning. They torture the family, mostly psychologically but also physically, and manage to recover both Schorschi and Anna after they escape their clutches. When Schorschi escapes, before he is brought back to the family home, he tries to get help from the neighbours whom introduced them to Paul and Peter, but he finds that family dead also - and we begin to realise what's going on.


Paul and Peter don't seem to have any motivation for what they are doing, outside of the thrill and fun of simply doing it. Paul often breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience, something which is quite disconcerting but unbelievably chilling. Initially it was quite jarring, but I actually think it provides the audience with a bit of a relief from the grueling trauma that they are otherwise put through - it reminds you that the film is not, actually, real, and that this level of unadulterated evil is a fiction. Here at least. These motivationless psychopathic murderers aren't actually underneath your bed, but far away on the other side of a film camera, spawned from the curious yet creative mind of a German auteur.


Yes, Haneke is probably deranged. I think this movie confirms it. But he is brilliantly deranged, at least. Like the Marquis de Sade. The way he manages to keep you on the edge of your seat without ever really showing you anything... it's all word play and palpable tension. He doesn't even use music for it - from memory, the only music in the film is diegetic, except for a track over the opening and closing credits. It's silence, light and exceptional performances from all involved.


I'm kind of curious to see the US version now, which he also directed, just to see what it's like. The original is so damned good, I don't know why you'd want to redo it, but hey. This one is another 4.5 star Haneke work.

The Best?

Hidden (or Caché) has been popping up on Best Of the '00s lists since they first started appearing a couple of months back - it topped the UK Times list, as you may remember.

Do I think it's the best film of the last ten years? No. Don't get me wrong, it is a damn good film. But I don't even think it's Michael Haneke's best film of the '00s (that would be The Piano Teacher, or La Pianiste - and how obstreperous can I be? That's three posts in a row where I've disagreed with a widely held view as to a director's best film. Geez, get a grip. All this railing against the mainstream mould ain't gonna get you nowhere.)

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche star (and much love is sent from me to both their fabulous souls) in another very grown-up thriller, each of them offering up riveting portrayals of their own half of a couple beset by fear of... what, exactly, we're not entirely sure. Auteuil plays Georges Laurent, a television presenter, with Binoche playing his wife Anne. They begin to receive strange videos, left on their doorstep, showing simply them. The first, for example, is a shot of the outside of their house, filmed for a couple of hours, showing nothing much more than the activity on the street, and the Laurent's leaving the house to go to work. That's it.

Gradually, however, the videos start probing in Georges' life. Into his past. They go to the police, but the police say they can't do anything until this person actually tries to do something to them, physically. So the two (and their grumpy teenage son) are left struggling to come to terms with a stalker who may or may not be dangerous, with no idea how to make it stop. Georges ends up stumbling on a theory after one of the videos, but his explorations of the possibility ends in tragedy, in one of the most powerful scenes I've seen in a while. The films ends, but leaves you wondering if it really has.

Hidden is a truly gripping film. It holds you in its beautiful framing and perfect tension without issue. The two magnetic and very talented stars keep you fearful and caring. Nary a foot is put wrong. And I don't really want to talk much more about it, because I don't want to start giving things away - I already fear I have let on too much. 4.5 stars.