This was my intro to the cinema of Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet; the notoriously hard-assed, ascetic husband & wife duo whose alleged extremes of modernist austerity have always piqued my curiosity as someone who naturally vacillates to the unyielding. Much has been made of the way that the duo deny their audiences any semblance of narrative pleasure through their Brechtian approach (Bresson is the key reference point here, only without the kinetic montage or heightened sound design), but while watching Class Relations, it becomes apparent that the denial of pleasure combined with the consummate rigor of the filmmaking is a means of casting the pleasures inherent in the image and sound, free of diegetic tethering, into sharp relief (a scene set on the edge of a forest, in particular, is eerily beautiful). The purpose of this ascetism is also (as per Bresson) to let the text speak for itself, in this case Kafka’s Amerika (I’m only familiar it with via the short story it’s based on, The Stoker), and it’s perhaps the relative accessibility of the text that has led some to deem Class Relations an accessible entry point to S&H’s work, for all its severity. The approach and fairly blatant themes sync up in some obvious but undeniably effective ways, with the grade-school-play stiltedness of the performances and blocking establishing a world where capitalism’s reach has everyone knowing their place and uncomfortably going through the motions based. Certain portions were watched through bleary eyes after a sleepless overnight Greyhound trip (this was probably the worst possible film to watch after immediately arriving in town in this condition), but overall the experience was one of entering a strange and alien environment that I want more of, which is really all I ask for from any intro to an auteur’s work.
MICHAEL (dir. Markus Schleinzer, 2011)
Compared to the complete assurance and conviction of Straubs’ precision, this debut feature by Markus Schleinzer is pure Haneke-lite; rigorous in the laziest and most non-committal way. Schleinzer, unsurprisingly worked with Haneke as the casting director on a number of his films, and he’s certainly found an actor who fits the bill for the eponymous pedo, though the lead actor’s resemblance to Arrested Development’s Buster Bluth is only one of the things that makes this glib exercise in ‘the banality of evil’ hard to take seriously. Alternating between the mundane details of Michael’s boring life as a corporate drone and his (heavily implied) activities with the kidnapped young boy locked in his basement, Schleinzer sticks to a formula of non-sensationalist filmmaking that, as Mike D’Angelo astutely noted, feels like an easy way out. Even then, Michael even fails its claims to being ‘non-judgmental’ with its vaguely moralistic ending, and if you haven’t predicted which image the film’ll do an abrupt cut-to-black on as soon as it’s a possibility, you really haven’t attended enough film festivals in the past decade. Neither provocative, challenging, engaging, or anything really, Michael makes the prospect of a hypothetical European film about a sex offender who lives in a backwoods cabin, dressed in convict clothes, luring kids in with giants lollipops seem like a radical alternative.
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