This is for me the most challenging of all the Haneke films, even more so than the similarly-structured Code Unknown.
After a few viewings, though, I get the impression that most of the film is spent observing the processes by which human beings (our work, home life, and beliefs) are rendered commodities that serve the juggernaut of Western Capitalism (Haneke implicitly gives us permission to assign society itself a characterization, since all of his films feature an oppressive social milieu that itself acts as a character).
Some characters become commodities successfully, but lose some of their identities in doing so. Other characters cannot be capitalized upon, fail as commodities, and are thusly rejected by the juggernaut or voluntarily remove themselves from it.
And in the end, television processes the whirlwind of senseless violence that ends the narrative proper into a "consumable" (Haneke uses a translation of this word in speaking about how television renders human experience) little nugget of infotainment squeezed between other already-digested "fragment" events.
My favorite moment in perhaps any of Haneke's films is the credit sequence, played out over traffic sounds but no music, where a young refugee from Hungary (himself becoming "cargo") rides on the back of a freight truck along a highway into the vortex of Vienna amidst other industrious motorists. The the long, calm shot ends as the truck drives past bright McDonald's and Coca-cola signs, welcoming us into the land of image and consumption.
So anyway, I could be totally missing the point of this movie, but based on my familiarity with the Haneke universe, this is how it strikes me.
Long Live Cinema
After a few viewings, though, I get the impression that most of the film is spent observing the processes by which human beings (our work, home life, and beliefs) are rendered commodities that serve the juggernaut of Western Capitalism (Haneke implicitly gives us permission to assign society itself a characterization, since all of his films feature an oppressive social milieu that itself acts as a character).
Some characters become commodities successfully, but lose some of their identities in doing so. Other characters cannot be capitalized upon, fail as commodities, and are thusly rejected by the juggernaut or voluntarily remove themselves from it.
And in the end, television processes the whirlwind of senseless violence that ends the narrative proper into a "consumable" (Haneke uses a translation of this word in speaking about how television renders human experience) little nugget of infotainment squeezed between other already-digested "fragment" events.
My favorite moment in perhaps any of Haneke's films is the credit sequence, played out over traffic sounds but no music, where a young refugee from Hungary (himself becoming "cargo") rides on the back of a freight truck along a highway into the vortex of Vienna amidst other industrious motorists. The the long, calm shot ends as the truck drives past bright McDonald's and Coca-cola signs, welcoming us into the land of image and consumption.
So anyway, I could be totally missing the point of this movie, but based on my familiarity with the Haneke universe, this is how it strikes me.
Long Live Cinema