Michael
Markus Schleinzer (2011)
Markus Schleinzer has a long list of credits on IMDB as both an actor – he has a small role in Michael – and a casting director, most notably for Michael Haneke’s films, but this is the first cinema feature he’s directed and he also wrote the screenplay. Inspired (if that’s the word) by the Natascha Kampusch case, the movie describes a few months in the life of a thirtysomething man who keeps a ten-year-old boy prisoner in the soundproof basement of his house. Unless I missed it, it’s not until late on in the film that we know that Michael is the name of the man rather than the boy. It becomes clear much sooner, though, that Michael has sex with the ten-year-old, who’s called Wolfgang, on a regular basis: it appears that he marks the dates in his diary. Michael was screened at Cannes last year where it received a mixed press. According to Wikipedia, the Esquire critic Mike D’Angelo, after seeing the film, tweeted: ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE IN AUSTRIA. SERIOUSLY.’
In 2006 Natasha Kampusch escaped from eight years’ imprisonment in a small cellar under Wolfgang Priklopil’s garage in Strasshof an der Nordbahn. In 2008 Elisabeth Fritzl disclosed to the police her horrifying life with her father Josef in Amstetten. From what he went on to say in his tweet, D’Angelo may have complaining about the themes of Michael Haneke films as much as about Michael specifically although the best-known piece of cinema deriving from the Fritzl case so far is not Austrian but the Greek movie Dogtooth. Austria does seem, however, to have cornered the market in shocking sex-captive cases in recent years, in which case it’s not hard to understand why Austrian writers and directors are drawn to the subject in the same way that Elephant and We Need To Talk About Kevin, in their original incarnations, were made in America – still the world capital of high-school massacres in spite of increasing competition. I think Michael is particularly likely to offend because the captor is a homosexual paedophile, and one of the interesting questions prompted by the film is why Schleinzer decided on this orientation.
Although the subject of Michael is a long way from populist, it could be argued that, in making its protagonist homosexual, Schleinzer panders to the audience (there are people who think that paedophile can only mean a man who has sexual relations with male minors) – or at least creates a distance between the audience and Michael. But it’s equally arguable that Schleinzer’s choice is more challenging to the viewer if we feel, as I did, something more complicated than complete repugnance for Michael and hostility towards him. When I read Edward Lawrenson’s admiring review of Michael in last week’s Big Issue and what he said about the film staying with him more than any other from 2011, I was sceptical: the subject matter was bound to make the film hard to forget. Now that I’ve seen it, though, I see what Lawrenson means. Michael prompts questions about Markus Schleinzer’s reasons for making the film at all, about whether you should be watching it at all. (Because I couldn’t get out to the cinema for a few days, I saw Michael through the recently-launched ‘Curzon on Demand’ facility. Watching this film at home made me uneasy in a way I might not have felt if I’d been in a cinema with other people.) The proof that the movie deserves to be taken seriously is in the scrupulous construction of the screenplay and development of Michael’s character – in Schleinzer’s ability to keep making you think again about his protagonist.
Michael is an Austrian living and working in Germany. He’s employed by an insurance company. As far as we can see, he’s good at his job. When he’s called in to see his boss one day, he wonders for a moment (and so do we) if his terrible secret has somehow been discovered but it turns out the boss wants to know if Michael’s interested in being considered for a senior job that’s about to come up. He confirms that he is, although the boss tells him there are other candidates too. In the canteen at work, a colleague, Christa, chats to Michael about her great uncle living in the same street as him but, when someone else sits down and raises a work matter, she switches her attention to him and Michael is easily ignored. Later on, Christa visits her relative and pays Michael a surprise visit. He panics and ejects her violently. Although this may sound like a predictable payoff to the earlier scene involving her, Christa’s appearance at Michael’s home still comes as a shock – to us, as well as him. And although you expect his sudden loss of self-control to lead to Michael’s comeuppance, it doesn’t. Christa makes just one further and brief appearance, telling Michael in the office that she won’t be able to come to an event after work that evening. He receives her apologies with amiable indifference. In this scene, Michael is suited up – previously at work he’s worn a tie but with a pullover and trousers rather than a suit. The change of costume means what it looks to mean: Michael has been promoted and is hosting an office party that evening to celebrate. Pouring drinks and handing round food to colleagues without needing to get into sustained conversation with them, Michael is more socially at ease than we’ve seen him before. Driving home, he sings along to Boney M’s cover of Bobby Hebb’s ‘Sunny’, which is playing on the car radio. Michael is euphoric but, when he gets back home, he finds his prisoner Wolfgang in no mood to let a good evening continue.
Schleinzer may have benefited from watching Haneke work with the children (cast by Schleinzer) in The White Ribbon: he certainly gets a fine performance from David Rauchenberger as Wolfgang. Although the child’s captivity is distressing to watch, it’s one of the most daring and effective aspects of Michael that he isn’t merely a hapless innocent. As you watch Wolfgang colouring and writing cards for his parents, you admire his tenacity in keeping doing things. Michael stores these missives in a box in the house and, at one point when Wolfgang is being disobedient, tells him his parents don’t want to hear from him anymore and have said that Wolfgang should do as Michael says. That upsets Wolfgang but the child is also capable – and knows that he’s capable – of hurting Michael. On Christmas Day, they exchange gifts: Michael gives Wolfgang the fifth Harry Potter book (the same present he’s bought for one of his nephews). Wolfgang gives Michael one of his home-made cards – with a drawing of two figures, who I took to be Wolfgang’s parents, inside. Michael’s polite thanks don’t conceal his disappointment.
We watch Michael watching a porn movie. A man in the movie says, ‘This is my knife and this is my cock – which one shall I put in you?’ This makes Michael laugh – it’s the first time in the film that his face cracks (which is part of what makes this moment so shocking). Michael is so tickled by this idea that, when he and Wolfgang are next having dinner together, he repeats the lines and unzips his fly to offer Wolfgang the choice of his penis or a butter knife. (According to Wikipedia, an ‘invisible split screen’ was used for this sequence so that David Rauchenberger didn’t fully participate in it.) Wolfgang replies without a moment’s hesitation, ‘Your knife’. Catherine Wheatley in Sight and Sound cites the couldn’t-care-less tone of the child’s response as evidence of how ridiculously tedious Michael is. Perhaps, but it’s possible to read Wolfgang’s response in a very different and chilling way. As the words ‘Your knife’ and the tone of their delivery sank in, it seemed to me they signified a kind of dazed cynicism on Wolfgang’s part – that he was saying, in other words, that he’d rather die than continue a life of sexual abuse by Michael. Whatever the intention of Wolfgang’s response, its effect is to make Michael feel ashamed and rejected.
It’s often said about paedophilia that its essential element of desire is to exploit a position of power rather than express any kind of sexual preference. There’s a moment in Michael when Wolfgang struggles to overpower Michael and the older man laughs at his efforts. But Wolfgang is a tenaciously tough nut, physically brave and mentally canny. When Michael returns from the triumph of his promotion party, Wolfgang is racing round the basement pretending to be a wild beast. This is partly the natural self-expression of someone in a cage, partly a way of keeping himself amused and crucially, as soon as Wolfgang perceives Michael’s reaction to the performance, a way of disconcerting his captor. This is a brilliant sequence: it threatens the paedophile balance of power; because Michael has just returned from the grown-up social world in his smart suit, Wolfgang’s behaviour also taps into something more general about a child’s capacity to say or do something unrestrained and embarrassing, and which can floor an adult. Having thrown Michael off balance, the resourceful Wolfgang presses the advantage home, meting out an apt revenge for what Michael has subjected him to. We’ve seen the child more than once having to boil a kettle to make himself a drink. We’ve watched him cleaning, along with Michael, work surfaces and toilet seats. When Michael returns to the basement and opens the door, he’s greeted with an animal roar from Wolfgang, who throws liquid in Michael’s face – it may be boiling water or cleaning fluid but it’s enough to mean that Michael is temporarily blinded. He still manages to prevent Wolfgang from escaping but the liquid has the effect of a fatal wound. Michael gets out of the house and into his car and drives off. The car disappears into the darkness and crashes. Schleinzer then cuts to paramedics carrying what is evidently a corpse into an ambulance.
What’s impressive about Schleinzer’s portrait of Michael, and Michael Fuith’s admirable playing of him, is its continuing complication. At first, Michael’s unprepossessing appearance makes him almost a cartoon of nondescriptness – balding and beaky-nosed, amorphously bulky in his glumly tasteless clothes, which always look either too baggy or too tight on him. As the film progresses, you start to notice not just his unattractively wide hips but his powerful thighs and the sense of a physical strength which can hurt someone weaker than he is. Early on, Michael seems isolated too – in that brief lunchtime conversation in the canteen, for example – but we come to see he’s not simply isolated. He meets his sister before Christmas to exchange family presents then – a surprise – he goes for a few days’ ski-ing with two male friends. Although it confirms our growing sense of Michael as a man whose solitariness is chosen, this section isn’t completely convincing. It’s hard to believe the two other men, who clearly regard Michael as a dweeb, would spend time with him; unlike them, he’s utterly inept at the skiing. Yet the scenes on the ski slopes – the anonymous black figures turning in the white landscape – seem to express Michael’s alienated existence. His aggressive fury when he falls in a heap and is stranded on the mountainside is upsetting. Fuith’s acting is highly naturalistic yet he never disappears into the man he’s playing. Thanks to the individuality that Fuith develops, Michael increasingly becomes a character study rather than a case study. We seem to be observing a particular personality rather than just the behaviour of a type.
When the three men go for a drink one evening on the skiing trip, the woman who runs the bar seems interested in Michael (possibly because she realises neither of the other men will be interested in her). There follows a brief scene of Michael’s penetrating her from behind, with difficulty and without enthusiasm. (This is the only sex shown on screen in the movie.) The sequence makes its point although you’re conscious that making a point is its sole purpose. I wasn’t persuaded either by the idea that, because Wolfgang is lonely and getting bored, Michael would try, unsuccessfully, to abduct a prospective companion for him. Some of Schleinzer’s rhyming feels too neat for the subject matter yet he’s able to give follow-up moments a charge that transcends their conception – the liquid that Wolfgang throws at Michael echoes the snowballs which, in a fit of unaccustomed horseplay, Michael collects from outside and chucks at the boy in his dungeon. (The snowball-throwing may also be an expression of relief on Michael’s part, safely home after his gruesome skiing holiday.) The final car accident – which could be suicide rather than an accident – picks up the earlier episode when Michael, hurrying across the road to get medication for Wolfgang from a chemist, is knocked down by a car and briefly hospitalised. The contrast between the open-plan offices of the insurance company and the locked, sealed-off areas of Michael’s home – a place of memorably bleak aspect, even from the outside – is obvious but the images (photographed by Gerald Kerkletz) acquire, through repetition, an increasing weight. The gradual descent of Michael’s automatically locking garage door and his bolting the door to Wolfgang’s basement prison make you feel empty and hopeless.
That door is seen in the film’s final image. At Michael’s funeral, the priest has consoled the family – telling them that Michael has gone before, recalling his ‘impatience’ in childhood anecdotes supplied by his sister (Ursula Strauss). Afterwards, his grieving mother (Christine Kain) and his brother-in-law (Victor Tremmel) are clearing out Michael’s house. The mother goes down to the basement and starts to open the door. Schleinzer could be accused of evading the difficulty of dramatising the family’s reaction to what’s about to be discovered there but I think he was right to end the film at this point: it is, after all, the story of Michael. One of the most unsettling aspects of the piece, which Schleinzer realises very successfully, is the apparent proximity of the modus vivendi of Michael and Wolfgang to that of a normal family. Like a real parent, Michael scolds and takes care of and indulges Wolfgang. The boy as plenty of space in the basement, which is well stocked with snacks and the art materials he likes to use. When Michael takes Wolfgang on a day out (well out of town) they walk together in woodland, where a father and his young son are also walking – at least, we assume these two are father and son though they don’t look any different from the other pair. At Christmas, Michael and Wolfgang decorate the tree and stand before it singing ‘Stille Nacht’. It’s through showing their life together as, in some respects, a facsimile of conventional family life that Markus Schleinzer, Michael Fuith and David Rauschenberger succeed in reminding you of Michael and Wolfgang’s devastating distance from it. When Wolfgang is ill, Michael is anxious to get medicine for him. But he also goes into the woods to dig a grave, in case it’s going to be required.
7 March 2012