| New film from the creator of “The Pianist” Yesterday, a new film by Austrian director Michael Haneke, “The Time of the Wolf,” was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. When the festival program was announced, journalists and film fans were surprised. How is it that the famous Haneke, whose “The Pianist” won three prizes at Cannes two years ago, is not invited to the competition? The organizers explained: director and actor Patrice Chéreau, who this year is the chairman of the jury, starred in one of the supporting roles in the film, so they decided to arrange the premiere of “The Time of the Wolf” outside the competition, so that no one would suspect the jury of bias. After watching yesterday, it became clear that this was not the main reason. It's just that Haneke's new film is a real failure.
Everything went wrong from the very beginning. When the ascetic credits appeared in complete silence, one of the journalists who came to the morning press screening sounded them out with an annoying cough. The incident had an unintended comic effect: such a simple, such an ordinary sound - a cough - suddenly revealed all the strain of Haneke's radicalism, which a couple of years ago was the latest in film fashion. The audience laughed. And after 110 minutes of the film, shot in such a gloomy gray-brown-crimson color scheme that some formless shadows walked across the screen instead of the heroes, completely different sounds were heard: rare applause was drowned in a decisive “boooo!” - an unprecedented case for Cannes.
To be honest, your humble servant took what was happening with some gloating. Yes, of course, Haneke is an extraordinary director. In Funny Games (1997), he managed to create an atmosphere of sticky and inevitable horror - he literally pulled the viewer out of the shell of indifference with which we usually contemplate violence on the screen. However, the final rewind gag (at some point one of the characters, who was not satisfied with the development of events, grabbed the remote control, pressed the REW button and “rewinded” the film’s action a few minutes back) smacked of pretentious student avant-gardeism. In The Pianist (2001), Isabelle Huppert played one of her best roles, and Haneke developed a convincing formula for the relationship between culture and sexuality. But, frankly, in the second half of the film, all psychological plausibility disappears in the relationships of the main characters, and the film almost turns into a parody of itself. And so Haneke made a film in which his merits were not manifested in any way: the ability to work with actors, make the viewer’s nerves vibrate, and bring out the hidden impulses of the characters into the light of day. Only shortcomings remained: home-grown radicalism, false profundity, an arrogant claim to know the “ultimate truth” about life. In a word, all the vices characteristic of the vast majority of student short films.
Time of the wolf - you know what? In German epic, this is the era immediately preceding the end of the world. And in the film, the end of the world has already come. When a family of four arrives at their country house, it turns out that strangers have occupied it. After an unconstructive dialogue, the father of the family gets shot in the chest, and the widow and her two children go on a trip through the countryside. This is where it turns out that most of the people have disappeared somewhere, the main value is drinking water, since the wormwood star, as usual, fell on water sources, and self-organized communes roam the earth, power in which is quickly seized by speculators and looters. The causes of the disaster are unknown.
Films about the end of the world came into vogue with the beginning of the Cold War and the arms race. In them, humanity outlived its fear of total destruction - and, it must be said, outlived it quite successfully. The new world order allows and even encourages small victorious wars, but the threat of total destruction is long delayed. In this situation, making a pretentious film about the end of the world, to put it mildly, is somewhat untimely: if you want to create a social drama, there are enough other problems. And watching Isabelle Huppert’s heroine exchange jewelry for water is downright funny. Well, modern civilization has produced enough bottles of mineral water to feed the surviving handful of earthlings.
If Haneke does not learn lessons from such a deafening failure, does not leave the fate of the world alone and does not reduce his cinematic arrogance, he has every chance of becoming an Austrian - not even Sokurov, but Konstantin Lopushansky. And the most pitiful person in this situation is Isabelle Huppert. The main role in such garbage, played in an inventive, monotonous, sluggish way, is an unpleasant stain on the reputation of a great actress. Alexey MEDVEDEV, Cannes |
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