Oscar predicting vs. Oscar deserving

Michael Haneke and Intimate Violations

     Director Michael Haneke (White Ribbon, Funny Games, Cache) has perfected the art of cultivating audience discomfort with shots that violate our sense of personal intimacy. In short, Haneke uses shot techniques and character interactions that violate our most taken-for-granted personal spaces. For instance, in the self-conscious Funny Games (2007; 1997) a pair of unlikely petulant young serial killers are invited into unsuspecting family's vacation homes under false pretenses. After being invited in to "borrow an egg or two" they proceed to escalate the tension by requesting inappropriate accommodations and asking questions that violate common decency, until the tension ultimately produces an explosion of violence. For us, the discomfort of Funny Games is in its resonate violation of person intimacy. The two killers are not spectacular monsters, but rather mundane overprivileged sadists.  The terror they inflict is on the personal space of the home (emasculating the father, sexually terrorizing the mother, forcing the family to play games that pit them against each other with torture and death the inevitable outcome etc.). Haneke makes the audience an intimate member of the family, taking us along what would have otherwise been a family's pleasant but ultimately boring vacation. After we are invited into the home, he tears it to pieces. The violation is accentuated by the killers direct address of the audience. The killers use a "universal remote" to rewind the film itself after making a fatal mistake that results in their captives gaining the upper hand. One of the killers looks at the camera and in so many words tells the audience to give up their own revenge and escape fantasies: its not that kind of film. The audience is reminded that they are also the captives, so they might as well play along with the killers sadistic fantasies (the inference being they represent the latent blood lust of the horror film audience). After the family is finally dispatched, the pair moves on to the next home, reminding us that the cycle of violence and bloodshed will continue without consequence. 

    Haneke brings audiences into places we typically have no business being (or at least places where the audience is not supposed to go; the spaces of ellipses where gaps in time (cuts) are connected through inference). Of course, many films bring us into the home, but not with the kind of uncomfortable intimacy Haneke cultivates. It is his technique that at once constructs a sacred intimate space and violates our comfort by introducing something person or force that represents the profane.  For instance, in White Ribbon (2009) Haneke takes us inside the homes and community of interwar rural Germany. Throughout the film, rising actions that violate the community's strict religious norms are never actually depicted but nonetheless cue us into the inevitability of a reactionary response by the town's male authority figures. We see very little action, only causes and consequences. We are taken into the homes of “the Volk” and invited to take note of the abusive and reactionary (perceptually mystical) forces that ultimately give rise to German fascism. The actions are mundane; the consequences are tragic. 

     Similar to Haneke’s other films, Amour is a beautiful yet painfully intimate and fearless portrayal of precarious life. It depicts the life-long bond of an elderly couple (Georges and Anne, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) tested by human frailty. As Anne suffers a series of debilitating strokes, Georges struggles to maintain her dignity and care, as he vacillates between perspectives of debt and obligation to burden and liability. The story takes place inside the cloistered world of their Paris apartment and is filmed predominantly in a medium shot that captures the facial expressions and body language of each character as they respond to each other’s presence and absence. What is remarkable is how Haneke makes the audience live in the mundane and uncomfortable space between the ellipses: long takes of Georges brushing his teeth, reading, listening to music; the couple sharing routine conversations and meals together (both of which become more difficult as the Anne’s condition worsens). 

Typically, shots are cut and arranged to create visual storytelling that infers connections between disparate moments and places where action is inferred. Consider how montages advance the action by speeding up time through jump cuts that infer not only character improvement but also a significant passage of time. The spaces in between are often erased to make room for only significant actions. Audiences can infer that the characters eat, sleep, and go to bathroom without the actions being explicitly represented. Haneke, however, builds tension and propels the story not only through cuts that infer the passage of time but also through long takes of events that most films would edit out for continuity and efficiency. Again, the audience is held captive in the couple’s apartment, much like the couple themselves whose world has shrunk on account of Anne’s failing health. 

     As he did in Funny Games, Haneke positions the audience as an uncomfortable voyeur that - by virtue of watching the film - will be invited to gaze upon the parts of life that take place in the kind of intimate spaces that they are typically not privy or accustom. The film begins with Georges and Anne (without close ups of the couple or any cues that they are the film’s protagonists) taking a seat in crowded musical theater. The audience’s seating arrangement mirrors that of a movie theater (our theater was, however, remarkably empty). The audiences are forced to stare at each other uncomfortably, waiting for their respective shows to begin. Perhaps this introduction is a self-conscious gesture at the film’s voyeurism, its uncomfortable closeness to the daily activities most films spare the audience. While this process sounds excruciating, it brings the audience closer to understanding the smallest and taken-for-granted gestures, habits, and behaviors that bond each of us to each other. When those intimate habits are destabilized, made more arduous and lonely, or deprived of meaning and value, we are forced to confront the nature of love and structure of our frailty. 

     It is also remarkable that Haneke is able to achieve this effect without the use of overwrought emotion or extreme sentimentality. He gives attention to the detail and routine of life without wallowing in overly dramatized and hackneyed reflections on the nature of life and death (like the kind seen in some tear-jerker films that get panned by critics). For example, Georges recalls a film he watched in his youth. He cannot recall the details of the film or what made him cry, only the experience of trying to recount the details of the film to someone else and feeling ashamed that the emotions were ever more powerful the second time around. For the audience, the details of the rising action in Amour are not as important as the structure of feeling it evokes. When asked “what was Amour about” by a friend, I was similarly at a loss for words. The plot can be summarized quickly, as there were very few characteristically major plot moments to mark the rising action. Yet, when asked to recount the film today, I could not help but feel nearly overcome with feeling and emotion. Like Georges, I could remember few of the details in the same way that I cannot tell you what I had for breakfast or at what time I brushed my teeth; however, I can feel the passage of the day and describe the warming presence of others throughout the mundane exercise of my life. Watch the film with a loved one and appreciate what Haneke attempts to have you see in yourself.