Hotel

Writer-director Jessica Hausner's fourth film, Hotel (2004), is a chilly thriller that evokes comparisons with movies from fellow-Austrian Michael Haneke, Denmark's Lars von Trier and Hitchcock in humour-less mode. Technically, it's above par, highlighting natural and available sounds (banishing any additional soundtrack music, but finding valid excuses to include musical moments). It also uses available light well; (starkly so, almost suggesting the movie should have been shot in black and white). Dramatically, however, the movie bombs.

The central character, Irene (Franziska Weisz, an actress and King's College master's degree holder in development and environment), is a newly-hired live-in receptionist living at an old-fashioned hotel deep in Austrian pine forest. The girl she replaced, and closely resembles, had vanished suddenly, and other hotel staff are eerily watchful and edgy.

Local history tells of a 16th-Century witch who was burned to death: the Lady of the Woods is a bogeywoman, but the screenplay understates her presence. Irene is taken to see her legendary cave by a young artist she meets at a disco. Kisses lead to him staying a night in her hotel room, but do not lead anywhere in the plot and her or his character development.

Other red herrings or loose ends hang around the sombre hotel and surrounding forest, which seems to lure Irene into staring at it and walking through it many times without any explanation. Some of her hotel colleagues pray, tell lies, eye her suspiciously, and two detectives pass through the lobby to conduct unseen interviews. Irene swims in the hotel pool in off-duty hours, and smokes outside a locked basement door.

And then the official Artificial Eye DVD ended, abruptly, inexplicably, after its advertised 73 minutes. The movie lasted 83 or 86 minutes when it appeared at European film festivals; it was impossible to care what had been excised, and why. A short story with a lot of potential had become a short film without any meaning.

Funny games (2)

Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke won the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe in 2010 for The White Ribbon. It was such a starkly menacing B&W depiction of pre-Nazi Germany that its failure to win that year's Oscar caused surprise. Maybe the following quotation [in Wikipedia] from Haneke's writings helps explain the deliberate rejection by so many Oscar voting members:

"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus." [From "Film as catharsis"]

Maybe Hollywood also never forgave him for his US$15-million 2007 English-language replica of his U$5-million 1997 German-language psycho-thriller, as Funny Games U.S. It doesn't so much empower its audiences as strip their souls naked, forcing them to see themselves as voyeurs and puppets. European film-makers often do that; Hollywood doesn't. It enjoys making Cape Fears, Saws, Hostels and Elm Streets galore, but they are not designed for audiences to look deep into mirrors of self-loathing. American movie-goers are trained to expect endings that are happy, virtuous, up-beat and escapist: Good triumphs and Evil is vanquished. Reality is different, and Funny Games rubs its audiences' noses in that brutal fact.

Naomi Watts executive-produced the remake, in which she stars as Ann, a rich housewife arriving for a summer vacation with her husband George (Tim Roth) and young son at their lakeside estate. Their neighbours are entertaining a pair of young men, one of whom walks over to borrow some eggs. When his pal enters the scene, he admires a golf club, and uses it to slaughter the family dog (off-screen) and break one of George's legs. The family will die in a time-limited game, the polite young men announce. Lacking any background music and with no sudden nasty shocks, the expected tension and horror do not materialise, and Haneke soon explains why not.

One of the young men makes occasional to-camera comments, preparing his audience for one of the nastiest directorial tricks; it slaps Hollywood conventions in the face. Does the audience expect a "plot development"?, one of the killers asks ironically.

The only visible difference between the two films is the decision to dress both the white-gloved young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) in white tennis shorts in the US version; in the original one of them wore black shorts. The four lead actors in the US production are not as effective as the German-speaking cast, and the whole faithful re-make (including set design details) is impossible to justify.

Watts (Welsh-Australian) and Roth (Brit) lack the somewhat patrician air of their German counterparts, and Pitt (The Dreamers) doesn't display the menacing maturity of the original. He and Corbet are barely credible as fresh-faced psychopaths, but they (and Haneke's dialogue) do manage to side-step an audience's inevitable assumption of homo-eroticism or incestuous brotherhood. They also, maybe coincidentally, remind an audience of the deadpan faces of the repressed children in The White Ribbon.

Haneke has created two movies out of a slim plotline that's only worth a 30-minute short or staged play. He spun out his material with long static shots that heightened neither cinematic tension nor dramatic intensity. The opening's sunlit aerial shots hold great promise of a nail-biting psychological horror show, but one of Haneke's characterless killers deliberately sneers at an audience which expects promises to be kept, even if they're false.

White ribbon

Michael Haneke has earned a clutch of top awards recently for his direction of angsty German-speaking art-house movies. A White Ribbon, Austria's entry for the 2009 Best Foreign-Language Oscar, has done especially well in other award races. Should it have won the Oscar? The simplest answer is No, mainly because its screenplay only really appeals to intellectual sensibilities.

Technically, it's a superb accumulation of skilled work by its technical crews and actors. Filmed very aptly in sharp, piercing B&W, it's a depressing tale of a plague of evil that afflicts a rural, semi-feudal German farming community at the start of the 20th Century. In its severely Protestant environment, strait-laced adults and resentful teenagers seethe, conspire and hate.

It begins with a never-explained mystery - the village doctor deliberately trip-wired off his horse - and ends with an unexplained calm settling on what was shown for more than two hours to be a very troubled community. Does the movie, as many critics guessed, depict a repressed social background that may explain the subsequent rise of National Socialism?

Why does the parson, revealing his inner anguish as a loving and fearful father only to the movie audience and only once, treat his family and flock with such vehement righteousness? Would the enforced wearing of white armband ribbons have helped children appreciate their innate sinfulness, or merely reminded them how to hide their true feelings? Does a field of butchered cabbages represent more than the vengeance of a dead farmhand's grieving son?

Above all, what are we to make of the hopefulness and loving feelings of the community's anti-heroic outsider and commentator? He leaves the village in the end, and promises to explain how certain events came to pass in later years, thereby prompting many to see the movie as an allegory or morality tale.

But no precise explanations are offered, or clearly hinted at. Instead, there's a Bergmannesque iciness to the movie, a conscious refusal to draw conclusions. We end up, frustratingly, with a damning portrait of rural society at a certain period in history, but that's enough of an achievement to warrant Haneke's awards. The ensemble acting and cinematography create the director's disturbing review of human behaviour brilliantly, in an engrossing B&W spectacle.