Crying Over Broken Eggs

Originally published in the April issue of the Brooklyn Rail

Crying Over Broken Eggs
By Jesi Khadivi

Known for his glacially paced, emotionally violent films, Michael Haneke has become one of contemporary cinema’s most loathed and feted directors. The Austrian takes on issues that many viewers would prefer to ignore—violence, class difference, power, guilt and sado-masochism.

He wowed American audiences with his 2001 film The Piano Teacher, his adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel about a masochistic piano teacher who becomes romantically involved with her much younger male student. Teacher won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Caché (2005), a thriller about a wealthy couple tormented by mysterious home surveillance tapes and crudely scrawled drawings, won Haneke an even broader American audience. The film also won at Cannes and Haneke nabbed the Best Director, FIPRESCI Prize, and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Last October, MoMA celebrated his career with a retrospective that included all of Haneke’s theatrically released films plus his work for Austrian-German television, calling him one of contemporary cinema’s “most provocative and incisive film makers” and citing a cinematic style “at once musical and mathematical.”

For Haneke, the medium is the message. As with Hitchcock, many of his films toy with the passive voyeurism of film spectatorship. Unlike the British auteur, however, Haneke largely denies his audience visual pleasure. In a typically sadistic fashion, viewers will be punished if they take delight in what they see. And that’s the best case scenario. At his worst, Haneke borders on being didactic and preachy. His films are masterfully constructed but far from visually breathtaking; Haneke remains obsessed with the hidden mechanisms of film rather than the pleasures movies elicit. Many of his films are comprised of long static shots punctuated by brief eruptions of violence, tedious bouts of ennui punctured by flourishes motivated by desperation (A neck slashing suicide in Caché). Each film is a taut, beautifully constructed trap and Haneke feels like a cat playing with his prey before devouring it.

Haneke’s recent American English-language remake of his echt-disturbing 1997 German-language film Funny Games has generated a fair amount of controversy. Critics challenge Haneke’s use of violence and voices have been raised in a superior moral tone, ad nauseum. Funny Games’ plot is simple, timeless even. An eloquent, self-assured young man and his awkward, winsome sidekick show up uninvited at a bourgeois family’s country home and proceed to physically and mentally torture them, all the while displaying impeccable manners.

Most of the violence occurs off-screen and much screen time is devoted to lengthy deliberations and emotional abuse that leaves viewers fidgeting in their seat. The deferral of violence is painful and the classic villainous duo of sadist and buffoon heightens the discomfort.

The “action” begins when a nervous, well-dressed young man named Peter (Brady Corbet) comes to the family’s door. He needs some eggs. Ann (Naomi Watts) is happy to oblige. Peter breaks the eggs before he is out the door. Ann gives him more. He breaks her cell phone by dropping it in a sink full of water. Now Ann’s pissed. Approximately 34 minutes and ¾ of a carton of eggs from the film’s start, the golf clubs come out and the funny games begin. That’s a long-ass time to get some action in a thriller, especially within the lexicon of big budget American movie wherein heads roll within the first 15 minutes of the film. It’s impressive that Haneke preserved his pacing, but the film suffers in other ways. The acting is solid, not stellar. Naomi Watts shows impressive range as Ann, but she reads too friendly and cheerful to play high WASP (That is, until the strangers start beating her family with golf clubs and chairs). Tim Roth and Devon Gearheart give impressive performances, but the sociopaths killers fall flat. This is unfortunate, because the strength of the film relies on their performance. In the original the pair of villains have a creepy In Cold Blood meets Kafkaesque vibe. Peter is a bumbling decoy, and Paul the sadistic genius. The fearsome logic of Arno Frisch (the original Paul and Benny from Benny’s Video) had me trembling in my seat. His trim, dark long-legged physique and steely deadpan demeanor showed a deeply disturbed, repressed psychotic mind. Michael Pitt never becomes his character; he’s in it for the shits and giggles. Funny Games is only the latest example of how the actor shows excellent taste in directors and material, but consistently fails to bring the necessary depth to his roles.

While the look and pacing of the film are still fresh and engaging, other elements haven’t held up so well. It’s tiresome when Peter and Paul break the fourth wall and address the camera. One of Haneke’s great successes as a director is how effortlessly he builds meticulous environments and distills emotions and gestures. He reduces cultural compulsions to their bare essence, though the cheap mechanism of direct address in his films seems like overkill. In an art house German film from the late ’90s, the renowned “remote control scene” packs a bit more punch. It lacks the same gravitas in a Hollywood movie, whose audience is accustomed to trickery. After 11 years, Haneke’s conceptual flourish seems gimmicky.

Haneke said that he originally made Funny Games with an American audience in mind. He comments on the remake: “When I first envisioned Funny Games in the middle of the ’90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naïveté.” Funny, because the “Americanness” of the violence is one of the least interesting things about the film. What was so riveting about the original Funny Games and what inspired my partner to demand that I “turn that damned film OFF” is how cultural repression and proper manners dovetail so seamlessly with violence.

The thought of letting a stranger, however well dressed he may be, into a German home on such a flimsy pretense is hard to believe. To demand the remainder of a carton of eggs after already breaking 3/4 of them in a culture where people discuss and formally agree to use du, the informal form of you, is virtually unthinkable. Manners are written into the German language. The unrelenting “darf ich...” (may I?) posed by the intruders makes Anna, Georg and Schorschi players in the game more than Ann, George and Georgie. Linguistically, the Germans are sanctioning their own demise.

While script, shot sequence, production design and score are virtually the same, something gets lost in cultural translation. When Funny Games is divorced from its cultural context, it takes on the air of a beautifully constructed, Germanically pretentious exploitation film. If you take Funny Games at face value it’s not very interesting, not much more than a film school exegesis on voyeurism, complicity and pleasure. Haneke is a director steeped in European history and aesthetics; he fails at telling an American story. I was hopeful about his first mainstream Hollywood film, even excited. If Haneke attempts another American film he needs to build an American story from the inside out, rather than fix a pedantic European hawk’s eye to the failures of American culture. Because without subtext Haneke will remain a pompous outsider looking in.

Everybody Gets Screwed

Everybody Gets Screwed
By Jesi Khadivi
The Yacoubian Building (2006), Dir. Marwan Hamed, Strand Releasing
Originally published in the Brooklyn Rail, February 2008

This good old-fashioned melodrama explores political corruption, sexual coercion, poverty, religious fundamentalism and the deep-rooted melancholia at the core of contemporary Egyptian life. At $6 million, Marwan Hamed’s directorial debut had the highest budget of any Egyptian film to date. The anxiously awaited adaptation of Alaa Al Aswany’s best selling novel tells the story of the Yacoubian Building, an elegant, old world building in downtown Cairo that has fallen from grace.


Once the home of well-heeled families, it now houses faded dignitaries, a homosexual newspaper editor and a rooftop teeming with dispossessed migrant workers from the countryside. Everyone has his or her cross to bear. Bothayna, a beautiful and conservative young woman, must help her mother support her siblings after her father’s death while dodging the leering eyes and wandering hands of her employers. Her childhood sweetheart, Taha, an earnest and studious janitor’s son, buckles under social pressure and shame at his poverty, and becomes a religious fundamentalist. Even the rich don’t have it so easy. Hatem Rachid, a cosmopolitan newspaper editor, lures young soldiers into his bed with bottles of fine wine. His smug countenance barely disguises the deep loneliness and isolation that he feels in a culture leagues away from accepting his sexuality. Haj Azzam, a millionaire drug lord/politician, takes a secret second wife after recurring wet dreams. Perhaps the most tragic figure in this social tableau is Zaki El Dessouki, a wealthy, foreign educated engineer from a distinguished Egyptian family. His neighbors still call him by the ceremonial title “pasha”, the rough equivalent of an English lord. His poorer neighbors revere him and ply him with requests for advice. Zaki’s social equals, however, see him as a skirt chaser fueled by copious amounts of alcohol.


At first glance, the film is a morality play with high dramatic flourishes. It’s shot like television and has the narrative engine of a soap opera. In spite of, or perhaps because of these traits, the film is surprisingly compelling. The power dynamic between men and women, rich and poor and urban and rural plays out between the sheets. Sex is the common currency driving the film and it provides insight into characters that would otherwise be lost beneath layers of schmaltz and melodrama. The sympathy that the simple, broad smiling soldier Abdo Raboh elicits as he unwittingly begins to succumb to Hatem Rachid’s advances is quickly complicated as he boasts that he frequently takes his wife by force when she is too tired to make love. The political and social ills of contemporary Egypt are expressed via sexual humiliation; everybody is screwing everybody else, but no one comes out on top.

Les Enfants Terribles

Originally published in The Brooklyn Rail, September 2007

Realism and fantasy collide in Les Enfants Terribles, the 1950 collaboration between celebrated directors Jean Cocteau and Jean Pierre Melville. Cocteau adapted the film from his successful 1929 novel which he wrote in a week-long haze of opium withdrawal. He commissioned Jean-Pierre Melville to direct after seeing Melville’s directorial debut, La Silence de La Mer. They’re an unlikely pair. Cocteau was known in literary circles as the “frivolous prince” for his willowy line drawings, poetry, and romantic, navel-gazing films featuring a high beef-cake factor. Melville became famous for his war pictures and hard-boiled Zen noirs.

The result is like Bertolucci’s The Dreamers with no sex. Equal parts Romeo and Juliet and Sunset Boulevard, with a dash of Cocteau’s roguish melancholia thrown in. The lush camera work and cornucopia of quotations from other films is thoroughly proto-New Wave. It’s no surprise that Bertolucci’s vampirish send-up to the genre borrowed so heavily from the film. What’s surprising is how boring Enfants (like Dreamers ) can be.

Les Enfants Terribles is the story of Paul (Edouard Dermithe) and Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane), a brother and sister who retreat into a private fantasy world after Paul is struck in the chest with a snow-ball. Paul‘s weak heart requires constant supervision and Elisabeth willingly plays the role of psycho-sadistic nurse. They spend most of their time in their bedroom awash in old books, magazines, night creams and cray-fish. When their hermetic circle expands to include Gerard and Agathe—two hopelessly sweet, bourgeois saps—Elisabeth happily extends her passive-aggressive needling to 
them as well.

Melville and Cocteau have different agendas, so its difficult to imagine them collaborating. The meaning of a Cocteau film is usually generated through flights of fancy. The result is either poetically moving or downright silly. The magic and perversity of Cocteau’s book seems cartoonish when subjected to Melville’s realism. In Melville’s defense, the screenplay so thoroughly obscures the book’s meaning that it’s surprising the author adapted it himself. The fantastical element so essential to feeling the story is consistently present only in Cocteau’s lilting narration, and Melville’s astute choice of Bach and Vivaldi for the score.

In some places, however, the marriage succeeds. A dreamlike, impressionistic snowball fight with achingly erotic undertones opens the film. Henri Decaë, Melville’s long-time cinematographer, inventively employs unorthodox camera angles and close-ups. Elisabeth pulls the audience into the childrens’ claustrophobic universe by complaining to the camera; she pre-dates Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s similar ploy for audience sympathy in Pierrot Le Fou by fifteen years. The performances gain momentum as the story progresses. By the end of the film Elisabeth’s controlling mania has reached Norma Desmondesque fever-pitch.

This Criterion release has a load of special features including interviews with actress Nicole Stéphane and other crew members and a short film about Cocteau and Melville’s collaboration. Despite it’s imperfections, Les Enfants Terribles is a worthy rental for Cocteau lovers and serious students of the Nouvelle Vague.