Michael Haneke: directing as a vivisection (part 6)
From our reviews about Hanek, it could be a deceptive impression that his filmography does not know failures and failures, however, this is not the case - the miscalculations of the great Austrian hit the Sinefil worship of him more painfully that they are completely inexcusable. The most insulting thing is that there are many of them (as many as four), because before proceeding to the analysis of his obvious masterpieces, which have already become classics (“Pianist”, “White Ribbon”, “Love”), we will say a few unflattering words about them.
Already in the “Seventh Continent” the continuity of Haneke’s art of video art, not only television, was visible: after working on TV for almost twenty years, this director preferred to carve sparks of authenticity, aggression, existence from seemingly external everyday situations, automated routine and everyday ritual actions. However, his subsequent work showed that Haneke’s approach is not as experimental as it seemed at first, he increasingly chose the audience cinema, the so-called “art mainstream”, like the same Trier or Almadovar. Both versions of "Funny Games" showed it.
However, in Code Unknown, he attempts to forcibly return his film to his early experiments, causing it to crumble into poorly related episodes, violence and aggression of characters that are supposed to be dramatic cement, too fluid and watery. Developing the theme of the clash of cultures due to the mass immigration to Europe of residents of the Third World, about which he said one of the first in the film “71 Fragments of Random Chronology”, Haneke cannot connect the mosaic of disparate plots together, because of this, the characteristic German logic and pedantry give way to shock emotionality and intemperance in the demonstration of interethnic conflicts.
He is so eager to get into the nerve of the era that he misses the target, even when the explosive content is packaged into a seemingly coherent narrative, as in "Hidden." Trying in “The Time of Wolves” to draw a certain pan-European maxim, hidden under the cloak of civilization: man is a wolf to man, he is mired in the unthinkable cliches of post-apocalyptic cinema. Without clarifying the background of either the characters or the context, Haneke seeks to create an analogue of social horror about the end of civilization, but it turns out that he is dull and static.
Always, as a former TV director, preferring medium and general plans to large ones and leveling this psychologism, from which neither Hupper nor Gurma are saved, Haneke in The Time of Wolves makes visual statics close to unbearable (this setup worked only once due to the extreme nature of what is happening - in Funny Games in the famous 10-minute scene of the liberation of victims, in scenes with reduced drama such static is disastrous). As in the “trilogy of glaciation”, the characters here seem to be frozen with something, even the collapse of civilization is not able to lure their guts out of the cultural deposits, simply because there is no such gut (as we saw in the second “Funny Games”).
“Time of wolves” claimed the breadth of the pan-European statement about the end of civilization, first of all in the souls, and only then in society, in the film “Happy End” (the last at the moment, the Austrian’s opus), this disappointing message is mixed with black humor, which goes to the film only in the minus. On the background 'Happy-end' 'Wolves Time' seems almost a masterpiece. . .
When Anna and her family arrive at their country house, they discover that strangers have settled there. Husband gets shot in the forehead. Anna and her two children are now forced to wander around. One day they visit an abandoned railway station. Here many helpless people have found refuge, the same refugees from nowhere to nowhere, who have to fight the world and each other for a piece of bread. They are gripped by despair and greed, but from time to time they are still able to show some human feelings.
They cluster around this station in the hope that a train will pass by and take them to a place where everything is not so hopeless. All of them – both old and children – are aggressive, angry and frightened. In this situation, first of all, the bourgeois of yesterday become outcasts. Rooted out of their environment and placed in a primitive state of wild struggle for elementary physical existence, it is they who break first. The end of the world has already taken place, but exact indications of what caused it are not given in the film. Whether it is war, or pestilence, or meteor shower. The “United Europe” of tomorrow is devoid of the now useless old borders and is in panic.
Haneke is a literalist to the bone. This is different from fellow craftsmen. Talking about the immersion of the world in darkness, he systematically plunges the viewer into the hopeless darkness, resolutely refusing artificial illumination of the frame. Haneke's likely apocalypse turns into a literal experiment to destroy a familiar narrative when nothing is visible on a dark screen. Not everyone is able to withstand this “bullying” and may even become depressed. This is probably what the author intended. And if you consider a good movie that gives the viewer the opportunity to hope for the best, “Time of wolves” is a nightmare movie.
I respect director Michael Haneke, he is a master of good, quality dramas, and his films are like nothing. The director likes to shock and surprise the viewer, and any of his films brings with them shock, drama and unexpected moments. Wolves Time is a psychological drama that doesn’t even have a ray of hope. The title of the film is taken from a German poem of the 12th century and means the time before the end of the world, which immediately suggests that the film will be very bad, tragic and hopeless. When I started watching movies, I expected something different than what I saw. At first, the film dynamically shocks and surprises the viewer, then everything stretches slowly and oppressively, and then we see the despair of people and their tears.
We see how civilization has collapsed, and the main characters are trying to survive in this cold and cruel world. A woman has lost her husband, and she is trying to survive with her two children, and we see the tragic and terrible story that was shown to us by a director who loves to make such a strange and dramatic movie in which people are doomed to suffer and are doomed to have no hope of salvation.
The film lasts a long time and it is psychological and puts pressure on the viewer with its drama and some cruel moments. I didn’t like this drama very much, I felt tension and injustice all the time. The movie turned out to be boring and uninteresting in places, I think it could be shot brighter, more dynamic and even more dramatic, but the director Haneke is well thought out, perhaps he wanted everything to be, and the viewer remained in this state and mood when he watched this drama.
The main role in the film was played by French actress Isabelle Huppert. She is a very talented and very good dramatic actress. I think she's always perfect for complex and psychological roles. In this film, she played decently and believably, but the film itself certainly wanted the best, because it is psychological and dramatic of course, but something was not so and something was missing. The movie causes a strange condition in the viewer and a headache. Why do they make movies like that? Perhaps the viewer should feel the whole side of the pain, despair and injustice that are an integral part of our world. The movie turned out to be far from a masterpiece, but I do not want to criticize it too much, because in some places it shocked me and introduced me to a strange state. I have a neutral attitude to the drama The Time of Wolves, but I would not dare to watch it for anyone.
5 out of 10
The apocalypse may come suddenly, but the fault will not be the cataclysms sent by Nature in the name of punishing man, but the man himself who has forgotten about humanity, lost his sense of guilt and compassion, became a wolf in a giant pack where everyone is for himself. Only those who are pure in spirit and conscience will be the key to salvation.
Anna found herself with her children at this railway station in a world without peace, without civilization, through no fault of her own. A handful of people like her, discarded and forgotten, are waiting here for trains and ways to escape. Sinners who pray for the righteous, sinners who need to heal their soul, sinners who are not ready for sacrificial redemption.
The philosophical drama The Time of Wolves directed by Michael Haneke, although passed at the box office unnoticed, was not ignored by the audience-intellectuals. This grim and depressing film is based not only on a purely German and Austrian philosophy of being, but also on a universal Christian dogma of sacrifice and salvation. Haneke shows the inner Apocalypse of the characters of the picture, the surrounding emptiness of the fields only personifies their own spiritual emptiness.
Isabelle Huppert and Beatrice Dall play their heroines minimalistic and cold, creating images not so much of real people as of the archetypes of human character.
Operator Jürgen Jurges sang the tape in gloomy and oppressive tones, filling the film's video sequence with heavy symbolism.
I recommend this picture to all fans of European auteur cinema and I think the film will not disappoint you.
8 out of 10
It is naive to bow down to the desire for destruction.
The water is poisoned. The earth is no longer able to feed its children. The air was filled with bloodlust. And no one spares each other. Lies, lust, greed and violence rule the ball. Women are forced to give up for a glass of water, and if they do not want, they will take it by force. A small man with a gun gets a chance to decide his fate. Murderers no longer face punishment. A neighbor does not let a neighbor in need of help. A traveler does not buy a cigarette unless he receives anything in return. The old woman avidly drinks the last milk to the drop, despite the fact that her old man is dying of thirst. Weak people, unable to act, comfort themselves with stories about the righteous who will once again save them. It was the twilight time of the wolves before the end of the world. Is there any hope for a new dawn?
After the provocative “Pianist”, dissecting the nature of the manias of one European, Michael Haneke in his next film went even further and revealed the spiritual abscesses of the whole society.
The director puts not only his characters but also the audience in a situation of complete uncertainty, misleading everyone from the first minutes of the film. Having almost duplicated at the beginning of the story one of the most powerful fragments of the first cruel “Funny Games”, forcing a woman to watch how the invaders of her home shot her husband without any reason, the director forces the viewer to think that the worst has already happened. In fact, the horror has yet to be experienced.
No special effects, no behind-the-scenes music, just natural light, a trembling camera suggesting it was being held by a weakened eyewitness hand. Watching the children wandering in an unknown direction and the mother, played once again transformed, very natural in her confusion Isabel Huppert, we see the world through their eyes. First we look with hope at the beautiful desert countryside in the light of day, then we try to see something with slight anxiety on the screen, which seems to be beginning to fade, reflecting the time when the sun sets, and finally we panic with this small family, left in pitch darkness. With the complete hopelessness of the situation in which the characters find themselves, we begin to think: this is the end of the world – lack of food, loneliness, despair and darkness, which is dispersed only by the glimpses of flames from the burning shed, the only refuge that we managed to find on the way.
But the director once again sent us on the wrong track, escalating the situation to the limit. And again it was just a tale, a shocking tale ahead. The long-awaited meeting with the same lost people does not bring joy and relief, but makes you remember the ancient German legend of the huge wolf Fernier, who swallowed the light on the eve of the day of Ragnarok, to which the title of the film refers, because human souls devoured evil and animal in them prevailed.
This author's futuristic project once found no understanding in Cannes. Apparently, Europe was not ready, watching the film-mirror, to see instead of the expected spiritualized smile of a contemporary animal grin. And therefore did not want to notice that the author made not a post-apocalyptic, as many believe, but a pre-apocalyptic film, drawing attention to the population of homo sapiens, standing on the edge of the abyss, exposing the reasons that led to this situation, and pointing to the way back. A well-known film moralist believes, as Tarkovsky and Jesus did before him, that only an altruist capable of sacrificing himself for the common good can stop the decline of civilization. He did not put a cross on the future of people. A man of pure heart was found. It's telling that it's a child. In the younger generation, the director still believed, and after all, five years later in The White Ribbon he would question the possibility that a sick society could raise healthy spiritual children, but he would do it in a veiled way and critics would accept his ideas favorably. But that'll be after. Meanwhile, the child’s ability to desperate and selfless action illuminates a dark and gloomy film with a wonderful redemptive light, inspires and gives hope.
It takes a lot of courage to take this picture unbiased. Are you ready for the test?