Austrian director Michael Haneke is, like John Waters, a provocateur. But unlike Waters’ impishly deranged exercises in bad taste, Haneke’s oeuvre disturbs in a much different way—he is often cold and clinical and relentlessly formal in structure, never more so than in his first three films, which have been tagged a “trilogy of despair.”
Made when he was in his late 40s, Haneke’s debut feature—The Seventh Continent (1989)—was inspired by the true story of a middle-class family with a young daughter who committed murder/suicide after systematically destroying everything in their household, even flushing money they had withdrawn from banks down the toilet (in a sequence that lasts an excruciating two minutes-plus and was, as Haneke predicted beforehand, the scene that the original Cannes audience found most disturbing, more so than the murder of a young girl).
The film follows a family over three days, one each in the years 1987, 1988, and 1989, opening with a real-time car wash as Anna (Birgit Doll), Georg (Dieter Berner), and their child Eva (Leni Tanzer) sit more or less motionless throughout. In each of the three chronologically spaced parts of the film, the family undergoes similar routines, from waking up and eating breakfast to the mother tucking the daughter into bed at night, but changes gradually become clear, both subtle and marked (in the car wash scene, Anna at one point undergoes an attack of anguish that feels claustrophobic).
As in other films, Haneke smartly cuts away during many sequences at tension-building moments, with every scene separated by momentary black screens. This technique becomes especially effective in the prolonged destruction of the household as viewers witness the increasingly violent demolition of items (always from the viewpoint of the perpetrator, so we see the smashing, ripping, and slicing, but not the family members’ faces).
Critics were split over The Seventh Continent—some saw the film as a powerful critique of a consumerist society in which a family destroys the things that are destroying them. Others thought it was pointlessly cruel (notably in a scene in which an aquarium is shattered and fish flop around on the floor, struggling to breathe) and ultimately ambiguous exercise (the family’s motives remain unknown) in torturing the film-going audience.
If The Seventh Continent was polarizing, Haneke’s next film—Benny’s Video (1992)—was even more so. In the opening shot, a terrified pig is killed with a pneumatic bolt gun. As the camera pulls back, viewers see that this is a video segment playing on a TV that is being watched (repeatedly) by the titular teenage boy (Arno Frisch). Benny is a fan of brutal violence, regularly renting movies from his local video store, where he one day meets a girl (Ingrid Stassner), inviting her back to his apartment (his parents are away overnight). After showing her the pig video—which Benny filmed—he plays a game of chicken with the stolen bolt gun, ultimately killing the girl in a sonically horrifying sequence that is mostly caught offscreen with his stationary video camera.
After doing his best to clean up, Benny eats some yogurt and goes to a dance club with a friend. The following day, he shows the video of the girl’s murder to his unnamed parents—played by Angela Winkler and Ulrich Mühe—who must then decide whether to turn their son over to the authorities or become complicit by covering up his crime. In a late scene, Benny’s father asks his son why he did it, and the affectless Benny replies that he “wanted to see what it was like.”
Of the three films in this set, Benny’s Video is the least compelling, partially because the argument that a steady diet of violence in media leads to violence in real life is not statistically borne out.
Oddly, the best film in the trilogy—71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)—is also (as the title suggests) the most fragmentary, presenting 71 scenes that vary in length from a matter of seconds to a patience-testing three-minute-plus stationary shot of a college student methodically returning balls rapidly ejected from a ping pong machine.
Following a barrage of news footage of world events (disturbing news clips are interspersed throughout all three of Haneke’s first films), several characters are introduced in separate scenes, including a young Romanian refugee struggling to survive on the Viennese streets, a couple with an ailing baby, another couple hoping to adopt a child, an old man who has a troubled relationship with his daughter, and the aforementioned college student. These various narrative strands will come together in a shocking climax that is prefigured by an opening title card about a real-life tragedy in which a young man killed three people in a bank before taking his own life. Some viewers may be reminded of Paul Haggis’ Oscar-winning Crash, which Haneke’s film pre-dates by a decade.
The films in Michael Haneke Trilogy are presented with high-definition digital transfers that crisply capture the filmmaker’s cooler color palette (leaning more toward blue) in often pristine-looking images. Extras include a trio of interviews from 2005 with Haneke, a new interview with actor Frisch, a new interview with film historian Alexander Horwath, a documentary about Haneke’s career (featuring interviews with the director and actors Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, and Jean-Louis Trintignant), deleted scenes from Benny’s Video, and a booklet with an essay by novelist John Wray.
Viewers familiar with Haneke’s more accessible later films—The Piano Teacher (2001), The White Ribbon (2009), and Amour (2012)—may well find these earlier works to be both frustrating to watch and singularly off-putting. But cinema aficionados will appreciate Haneke’s unique skills as he turns an unflinchingly critical eye on contemporary society. Recommended, overall, for larger public library and cinema studies collections.