Michael Haneke

  • Amour (2012)

    Amour (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, October 2019) The real horror movies aren’t always marketed as such. In Amour, for instance, we’ve got a near-intolerable depiction of a realistic and heartbreaking situation: an elderly man having to take care of a severely disabled partner at the very end of their lives. There’s no way it will end well, as either the premise or the opening moments of the film suggest. Much of the two-hour film is a steady descent into the inevitability of death and there’s nothing remotely fun about it. In Michael Haneke’s usual style, the camera lingers long before, during and after the main point of a scene has been made: there isn’t much of a plot despite the film’s running time, and that makes the experience even more harrowing. Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant are heartbreaking as a committed couple who end up suffering through no fault of their own except for the breakdown of human bodies. Despite the straightforward plot, Amour is a lot to take in because it deals in inevitabilities. No genre element, no fantastic creature we can deny: just what happens to a lot of us as we age. If the film has any upside, it’s to make the thought of dying alone seem almost like a happy ending considering the alternative.

  • Funny Games (1997)

    Funny Games (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) There are a few films whose reputation not only precede them, but tell you everything you need to know about them. So it is that Funny Games is widely remembered as the home invasion horror film that plays unfairly with its audiences, intentionally toying with expectations in order to leave them with no way out. The infamous remote-control scene is as extreme a piece of meta-cinema as it’s possible to imagine outside a satirical comedy. I would argue that knowing as much as possible about the film’s ending is not a bad thing, because writer-director Michael Haneke (who remade his own film in English for an American studio in 2007, changing almost nothing) is determined here to make a statement about film violence and audiences’ desire for revenge. And that he does. Over nearly two hours spent circling the same idea, often not even bothering to move or turn off the camera. It gets very, very, very long. I think that some of what he has to say here is clever—but brevity is the essence of wit, and Funny Games is far too long to remain interesting when everything points to an ending that is then executed without many surprises. I’ll forgive nearly everything in the service of a happy ending, but not in the service of an everybody-dies one. It doesn’t help that I’m not really a fan of vengeance cinema—Haneke seems intent to score points with another kind of audience. Still, by the end, I was not only hating the over-the-top psychopaths serving as Haneke’s puppets, but the entire cast and crew of the film for going forward with such an indulgent and pointless piece of cinema.