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Reviews
Lemminge: Verletzungen (1979)
Haneke meets Bergman when teen angst comes home to roost in adulthood
This Haneke follow up explores consequences (literally the injuries) of the earlier characters' inability to care or forge bonds of love and empathy. Alienation, separation, and an inability to connect frame the significant relationships here: between Christian and Evi; between Fritz and his wife, who's hysterical outburst is presented as a rational counterpoint to suppressed angst and bourgeois correctedness; and Fritz and Evi, a failed coupling that retreads old territory but through which they cannot find salvation. The injuries of the title are the emotional injuries that we cause each other because we don't know how to love each other properly. In this installment, Evi says of Christian to Fritz, "I told him I was becoming indifferent, but he didn't pay attention, and then it's too late." Thus the die is cast. Later, however, there are innocent victims children, other adults, etc. This follow-up film is in some ways a prequel to the first, suggesting that as parents are formed, so will they form their children: not to love but to disregard; not to empathize but to seek self-fulfillment. But the spirit is post -Bergman existentialism: cast out in the earlier installment from a cold and distant family, here Sigrid's cries alone on a hospital gurney. Having Sigrid approached her clergy with regrets about her near-term baby but he is unable to offer any solace beyond a drink. Part II adds to it the sense of loss, of time passed, and to the profound pain of ultimately being alone.
Lemminge: Arkadien (1979)
Haneke unplugged - consistent themes, early, bare-bones exploration.
The dark mood is set in the first scene: the vandalizing of cars. At once a deeply anti-bourgeois impulse and an act that expresses the faceless anomie of the post-war generation, this film is a melodramatic exploration of teenage resistance to overbearing parents and the constricting influence of a too-small Austrian town. Haneke upends Arcadia (youthful innocence) by transgressing boundaries such as sex out of marriage; smoking; and adultery with an adult. His teens damage cars and otherwise passive-aggressively act against parents. Haneke then subverts the bourgeois fiction of happiness and security by suggesting that in the end our own self-absorption and lack of empathy will relegate our relationships to hostile acts. We can never know each other, and that ultimately we cannot care. As the character of Sigrid's experience suggests, forget friends and family - ultimately we are cast out alone. The film is a bare bones exploration (a la Bergman) of the themes he will explore in more understated fashion in later work and more sensationally in Funny Games and Benny's video.
Nacido y criado (2006)
A haunting, sensitive and self-assured allegorical portrait of guilt.
The film is an allegorical story of self-abnegation and emotional purgatory. The idyllic, privileged realistic urban story of a happy family is shattered, and the audience slowly comes to understand that Santiago is stationed at a rural airstrip in an unidentified place. The transition is not explained. Is it before? After? The only thing concrete in this mens' world is the remoteness of the place and the earthly comforts of alcohol, music, and dance the visceral pleasures and a clear absence of responsibility. As if in a mirror image to his other life, Santiago in this new place is working-class; he smokes and somewhat misbehaves. It is suggested that his employment and future hangs on the whim of a supervisor out of his control. By choice? The film beautifully presents personal purgatory as a literally de-natured arcadia in contrast to the self-possession of his former life. It is a prison of the mind from which Santiago gradually emerges to ultimately find himself again walking with his wife to reconcile his guilt and ameliorate his self-alienation.