(Not so) Funny Games
Even if like myself you're acquainted with Michael Haneke's work only since Funny Games (1997), you still know you're not in for a barrel of laughs when he signs his name under a new title. Funny Games had a family tormented by a pair of psychos clad in tennis gear. A kid got murdered, and a pet. Code Unknown was oblique and difficult, but at least not savage. The Piano Teacher showed us Haneke hadn't lost his old edge: repression, heavy-duty SM, beatings and the odd razor clitorectomy reassured us that, well, this wasn't Austria's answer to John Hughes. Le Temps du Loup starts out bleakly: somewhere in Europe we are presented with a scenario in which essential services have ground to a halt, edible foodstuffs are hard to come by, people are murdered in their rural homes, and no information is available from central government. If you're Irish that all sounds completely normal, but this 'somewhere' seems to be France. This is not normal.

Let's can the laughs right there and approach Mr Haneke's cold cerebral cinema in a colder and more cerebral manner. It has been noted correctly that the beginning of his new film echoes the beginning of Funny Games. A bourgeois family head for their rural retreat in a 4x4 and are met by intruders. The parallels can be taken further. In Funny Games the pater familias is maimed (Freudians please read accordingly), whereas in the present film the father is murdered. In both films a family pet dies before long. And neither film provides rationalisation of these events, a fact often noted and even objected to by audiences.

Funny Games can be seen as an attack not so much on conventional cinema per se, as on the neuroses of the culture that engenders mainstream cinema conventions. It slowly dawns on the spectator that Funny Games is not a remake of Wait Until Dark, that the family will not escape their tormentors, and that children and small animals will die for no 'good' reason. The final affront: when the bourgeois couple overcome their attackers, the film rewinds and replays in such a way that the psychos come out on top again. The film is not only not playing for us, it's playing with us. All of this strikes home because mainstream cinema is a sort of obsessive-compulsive symptom, a neurotic ritual like excessive hand washing feeding the need again and again to go through the same 'logical' patterns of justification, explanation, redemption. Mainstream movies insist that reality has a certain shape and meaning, and even though we know these are 'only movies' we never quite let go of the fact that our realities should be manageable. We can make sense out of things. We can deal with the world and control it. The fact that on another level we can't deal with things, that nature for example is not always content to be the backdrop to a lovers' kiss, is why we have to keep going back to see movies: to lighten the shadow of the neurotic's doubt. And of course, the last thing we want to be confronted with is our doubt. That's not what cinemas are for.

Living with the unsual
Le Temps du Loup ups all of the stakes laid down in Funny Games. At its outset, the bourgeois father, on meeting the intruders in his rural retreat, typically attempts to 'deal' with them. Dealing means two things: talking things out 'rationally' and managing. Neither happens. The father is killed in an explicit reversal of mainstream expectations. Here again there is no explanation or motive for misfortune (at least in Funny Games you could argue that psychos are not always explicable!): the viewer is not told why dad dies, why there is no food, no water, no transport, no law, no order. That's just the way it is. A mother (Isabelle Huppert as Anne) and her two children Ben (Lucas Biscombe) and Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) will now wander in the cold and dark through a deserted rural nowhere. The family pet (some kind of budgie thing) will die. Where Funny Games was in a way about the process of discovering that what we are watching dissects rather than serves our needs as viewers, Le Temps du Loup is much quicker to strand us in that unusual position. What we will be discovering is what it's like to live there.

Although Anne makes her own efforts to 'deal' - particularly when she and her children make contact with a strange feral boy (Hakim Taleb) - she tires of talk soon after her arrival in a small refugee community that has set itself up in an abandoned station. In its own way the community is striving to re-establish the boundaries of sense and meaning, allocating property and space, rationing food, creating 'rules'. But Anne seems unable to cope with the incessant arguing that this attempt at restoration generates. It's as if she's realising that something more, or less, than 'dealing' will be necessary to survive in this very persistent chaos. Others in the station have already graduated to a new realm: a woman Anne shares a cigarette with tells her of a cabal of 36 'Just Men' who will save the world from disaster. So maybe magic's the answer (significantly the title of the film is taken from ancient Germanic legend)?*[note]

Haneke uses a number of unusual visual devices to implicate us in his attack on conventional needs (you could almost say, to make us the focus of this attack). His films are often anti-cinematic: filled with images that are cold, empty and hard-edged, even banal to the point that they become an affront to the viewer. This was certainly the case in Funny Games, a visually monotonous affair. Here early night scenes are filmed with available light so that we are repeatedly plunged into a virtual or even total blackness which seems to emphasize our more general disorientation in a way reminiscent of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible. As in The Piano Teacher, the use of sound in these scenes is minimalist but astonishingly effective, maybe underlining our blindness. A deeper form of disorientation occurs when we see the feral child framed beyond railway tracks, mirror-imaging Eva on 'our' side of these tracks: the laws of cinematic composition, of 'thirds' go out the window. The child is positioned centre screen, bisecting the rectangle doubly. Such laws of thirds exist so that the viewer, positioned ideally in a seat which bisects the cinema (middle row, half way to the back), has a master position that allows them to 'oversee' events unfolding onscreen in a subservient and 'ordained' reality. When an object, and more specially a character, moves centre screen it challenges the viewer's position by creating a kind of exclipse. The feral child's positioning onscreen not only physically rather than psychologically implicates us in unfolding events, it warns us that we are the object of attention here.

Exposed negatives
If there are early intimations that rational thought and 'management' will not deal with the problems which arise in Le Temps du Loup, this is confirmed when a mob of unexpected arrivals literally swamps the railway station and the order its community has established. Anne with the others tries in vain to insist on 'her space' as the newcomers crush in. Soon a new order is established, but its logic seems to be oddly gapped. Horses are slaughtered to save water and "provide meat", but no meat ever materialises. One of the original community suggests in a typically reasonable manner to the new arrivals that they move their fire further down the tracks so that it can alert oncoming trains, but we never see what they make of the suggestion or whether they move. The newly expanded community sets up night sentry rotas to patrol its perimeters, but we get the feeling that the darkness beyond the campfires is the reach of everything beyond the means of 'civilised' rational thought. The world is everything that is the case, but here the case is something you leave at the station.

As the prospect of any train ever arriving at the station recedes, and as the point of this large gathering of souls becomes less and less evident, the room for magic grows. A toothless old conjuror tells of a new race of messiahs, stronger than the 36 Just Men, who will jump naked into flames to save their bretheren. He claims people have witnessed this event in villages and towns. Anne's son Ben, downcast and traumatised, takes the man at his word and at night discards his clothing and makes ready to dive into a bonfire marking the outer reaches of the community. The boy is prevented from self-sacrifice by a sentry who holds him close and comforts him with a story of ridiculous hope and redemption. A movie ending. As we hear the movie ending recited, the outlines of the two figures are backlit, projected in our direction by the light of the bonfire. It's almost as if we are the screen, positioned where we would expect the objects of our attention to be. Haneke brilliantly takes our movie culture and beams it back on us, exposing and highlighting our cultural shortcomings.

And there's more. Our train finally arrives, but the irony is that we're on board! Once again we're situated where what we need to see should be: the film's closing shot is a fantastic long travelling take from aboard a train. The movement and elevation of the camera is a tribute to the power of our technology, of its supremacy over the nature it surveys. But we are where the technology is, so all we can see is nature.

If there's a problem with Haneke's cinema it's that it's much nicer to think about than to see. These are anti-films. If you want films - and films every bit as complex and provocative as those of Haneke - you'd better head in the direction Bruno Dumont or Wong Kar-Wai.

Tony Keily

*This graduation has an interesting parallel in recent 'catastrophic' world events. In issue 85 of FI an editorial of mine pointed out that attempts were being made to choreograph events following the 2001 attack on the New York in such a way as to make them into a sort of huge media movie: the resolve to survive, the identification of an aggressor, the struggle for supremacy and closure were all familiar to movie viewers. It probably seemed like a good way of making sense of things. But the Twin Towers as they became known, were just too big. The event was irreducible. After the movie wars and speeches, the catastrophe remained. What stood out was the strange date 911: the emergency number. Or the number eleven with its twin towering digits. Magic. Even the unnatural symmetry of the twin impacts with their mesmeric effect, followed by the twin collapses. Nothing could really explain all this away. There was, in the end, no way of 'dealing' with what had happened rationally. Aircraft bearing witchcraft.
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