Yves Montmayeur (2013)

The title picks up a flavour of received ideas about Haneke – clinically clear yet mysterious.  It’s also pompous, which he shows no sign of being.   The ‘H’ has a hint of Kafka (and Peter Bradshaw’s review notes that the Italian title of Antonioni’s The Passenger is Professione: reporter).  The whole, although it may sound different in French or German, isn’t far enough away from Austin Powers:  International Man of Mystery to avoid being somewhat ridiculous.  Yves Montmayeur’s documentary was made for television but is getting a release in cinemas, on the back of the great success of Haneke’s latest feature.  You wouldn’t normally bracket him and Woody Allen together but the honours piled on Amour give Montmayeur’s film a sense of climax in the way that Midnight in Paris did for last year’s film about Allen by Robert B Weide.  Montmayeur begins and ends with Amour:  the intervening structure takes us through Haneke’s work in reverse chronological order before returning to the present.   The film comprises interviews with Haneke and with actors in his films, clips from those films, and footage of the shooting of the films.  There’s also a sequence that shows Haneke teaching a drama class at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.  The talking heads, who aren’t named, include Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, Beatrice Dalle and Juliette Binoche – and, presumably on the set of The White Ribbon, Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Tukur.  The interview with these last two is the most striking – partly because Tukur doesn’t say a word, partly because the late Susanne Lothar talks interestingly about the differences between a child’s mind and an adult’s, contrasting the depth of the impressions made on the former with the ‘hardness’ of the latter.

At first (ie most recently), Haneke is reluctant to talk about what his films mean or refer to.    He’ll explain why he shot The White Ribbon (2009) in monochrome (because, in his mind’s eye, he sees the period in which it’s set in black and white) and that it includes sequences based on autobiography (the example he gives is the memorable scene in which the doctor’s young son asks his elder sister about death and whether everyone has to die).  Haneke won’t, however, comment on the children-who-grew-up-to-be-Nazis interpretation that has been put on the film.   As Michael H progresses, you begin to wonder if this avoidance of explanation is a lately acquired habit – whether it applies only to the films liable to be given a specific political interpretation, chiefly The White Ribbon and Hidden (2005).  Haneke seems quite happy to define the main subject of Code Inconnu (2000) as ‘the impossibility of communication’ between people, and to explain his intentions in making (the original) Funny Games (1997).   By the end of the film, he’s open and eloquent about the meaning of Amour compared with that of his first cinema feature The Seventh Continent (1989).  In the latter, the characters have ‘unliveable lives’ whereas in Amour they have lives which are good to live but which are destroyed by physical deterioration.  Perhaps Montmayeur’s main achievement is to show Haneke as someone much more personally involved than the cool style of his film-making tends to imply.  He says, for example, that he can manage without a psychiatrist thanks to being able to express his fears and neuroses on film.  He talks about his fear of physical suffering and of witnessing the physical suffering of those he loves.

Michael H also gives us an idea of what Haneke sees as relative weaknesses in his work and, less surprisingly, confirms what kind of actors he prefers to work with. He talks with some frustration about what he sees as his failure to put dreams on screen.  Montmayeur then shows a dream sequence from Hidden.   It’s very far from a complete failure – the insistent final movements of a chicken being killed in a farmyard are particularly startling.  What’s less powerful is the shot of the boy observing the chicken’s grotesque dance of death.  I think seeing the dreamer in this way is often what weakens a cinematic dream – interposing an image of the dreamer means the viewer is observing the dream at one remove.  (It’s not always weakening: Professor Borg’s nightmare in Wild Strawberries is a brilliant exception – although it’s notable that Haneke compares himself with Bergman in failing, relative to Buñuel at any rate, to realise dreams on film.)   Haneke describes Isabelle Huppert as one of the world’s great actresses, and commends her ability to express a great deal with an apparent minimum of technique.  I haven’t seen The Piano Teacher (2001) so it’s unfair to judge but this did make me wonder if Huppert is his ideal interpreter because she can be not only minimalist but blank – and so doesn’t get in the way of what Haneke means to say[1].

Some of the interviews appear to have been conducted during the shooting of the film under discussion at the point at which they appear in Michael H, others to have been done more recently.  It’s not always clear when the interview was done, although Huppert, for example, seems to be talking during the making of Amour.   The chronology is easier to sort out in relation to Haneke himself:  his spectacles change and he ages noticeably in the course of the interviews (he had his seventy-first birthday earlier this month).   He’s known to be extremely demanding but affable to work with:  there’s an amused self-awareness when he says, at the margins of a photo call with the cast of Time of the Wolf (2003), that ‘making a film with Haneke is always more enjoyable than watching one by him’.   When Haneke speaks in French, although he speaks it very well, there’s a welcome slight uncertainty – at least compared with his speaking in German.   He says (in French) that there are many different realities/truths – you choose what works for you.  The tone of his voice when he’s speaking in his native tongue suggests a single, and a less arguable, truth.

17 March 2013

[1] Afternote:  I’ve since seen  The Piano Teacher – and changed my mind about Isabelle Huppert.