intern-88
Joined Jul 2008
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intern-88's rating
'Don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie.'
It seems that those ironic cynics at Orange, producers of the anti- marketing marketing filmlets that preface virtually every British cinema release, missed a trick with the Rodrigo Cortes-directed taphephobic thriller, Buried. For what is normally a pain in the narrative for the modern thriller, where the peril of the protagonist is undermined somewhat by the fact of help only being a touch-screen away, is an indispensable plot mechanism in Buried.
The reason for that – as the pre-release hype, not to mention the title, intimates - is that Buried is set entirely in a coffin. It features just one visible actor: Ryan Reynolds. So unless you're currently pining for an alternate 1980s version of Buried, in which we get to watch a Hollywood sort-of-star slowly asphyxiate for no apparent reason, then you'll be glad of that incessant buzzing and pinging of a mobile phone. It doesn't ruin the movie; it makes it. That and the zippo lighter.
Although not quite up there with Krapp's Last Tape, Buried is a drama conjured up from the barest of elements, the most meagre of resources. During the opening couple of minutes it's as if the Spanish director is just bringing the component parts of the story together. Look, it says, out of nothing, something. In the beginning there was blackness, and then, suddenly, we hear the sound of breathing. Human breathing. Then the thumping starts, an indication that there is a solid world out there, in the dark. And then, at last, there was light. And now a face, a body, in a wooden coffin.
That is the premise. A man, whom we later come to know as American truck driver Paul Conroy, wakes up entombed, and he knows not why. He scrabbles about a bit. There's a bit of histrionics. And then with the discovery of a mobile phone, the drama starts. Because it's only through the various fraught, frustrated conversations that we learn a bit about Paul Conroy, what he does, what happened, and, to a lesser extent, what sort of man he is. And it's also only through that phone that there is any hope of resurrection.
There's no doubting the film's central achievement: to do so much with so little. Cortes seems to revel in the pacing of the narrative, of deciding precisely when to give the drama some propulsion and when to let it flag, when to let the audience hope, and when to let us despair. At points it almost feels like an experiment, an examination of the nature of narrative suspense, of what makes us tick, as much as showing us what makes Conroy tick. Although one cynical move, which gives a new meaning to the phrase trouser snake, does suggest an exhaustion of dramatic ideas rather than their fruition.
More effective is the claustrophobic setting, aided and abetted by the up-close-and-personal camera work. Not in the visceral sense of 'oh, that's what it would be like to be buried alive', or even 'doesn't Reynolds have thick bristles?', but again in the dramatic sense. Conroy's isolated, impotent situation is ours, the audience's; and his partial, inadequate viewpoint is all that we have to go on. We yearn for some other perspective, some viewpoint that might literally shed light on the darkened proceedings. And it's this prospect that drags us on, that is as vital to us looking for a point as it is to the character looking for a rescue.
Yet if this claustrophobic perspective, this frustrating limit to our knowledge, does seem to open up space for a more interesting film, this space is quickly filled by a really clumsy commentary on the Iraq War. It's this that ruins Buried, not a mobile phone. It removes a certain depth to Buried, digging for it instead a very shallow interpretative grave.
Conroy, we learn, is a truck driver working in Iraq on behalf of an American contractor. As we discover, the bad guys here aren't so much the kidnappers – despite their predilection for YouTube beheadings – as the Coalition of the Willing and Conroy's smarmy employers, both of whom combine bureaucratic indifference with legal slipperiness and sheer disingenuousness. Their willingness to evade responsibility for Conroy becomes all too achingly metaphorical. His mess is Iraq's, too. A mess better buried than confronted.
Which for anyone as unmoved by Reynold's performance as I was does have its benefits. Shouty-angry – and yes voicemail can be annoying – is never going to ingratiate you to any would-be rescuers. Nor will it win you sympathy from an audience, unless brattish prattishness in a confined space is your thing. And the occasional lapses into frat-boy wiseacre mode seem to come from a supercilious place closer, perhaps, to Reynolds, than to a man buried alive somewhere in Iraq.
It seems that those ironic cynics at Orange, producers of the anti- marketing marketing filmlets that preface virtually every British cinema release, missed a trick with the Rodrigo Cortes-directed taphephobic thriller, Buried. For what is normally a pain in the narrative for the modern thriller, where the peril of the protagonist is undermined somewhat by the fact of help only being a touch-screen away, is an indispensable plot mechanism in Buried.
The reason for that – as the pre-release hype, not to mention the title, intimates - is that Buried is set entirely in a coffin. It features just one visible actor: Ryan Reynolds. So unless you're currently pining for an alternate 1980s version of Buried, in which we get to watch a Hollywood sort-of-star slowly asphyxiate for no apparent reason, then you'll be glad of that incessant buzzing and pinging of a mobile phone. It doesn't ruin the movie; it makes it. That and the zippo lighter.
Although not quite up there with Krapp's Last Tape, Buried is a drama conjured up from the barest of elements, the most meagre of resources. During the opening couple of minutes it's as if the Spanish director is just bringing the component parts of the story together. Look, it says, out of nothing, something. In the beginning there was blackness, and then, suddenly, we hear the sound of breathing. Human breathing. Then the thumping starts, an indication that there is a solid world out there, in the dark. And then, at last, there was light. And now a face, a body, in a wooden coffin.
That is the premise. A man, whom we later come to know as American truck driver Paul Conroy, wakes up entombed, and he knows not why. He scrabbles about a bit. There's a bit of histrionics. And then with the discovery of a mobile phone, the drama starts. Because it's only through the various fraught, frustrated conversations that we learn a bit about Paul Conroy, what he does, what happened, and, to a lesser extent, what sort of man he is. And it's also only through that phone that there is any hope of resurrection.
There's no doubting the film's central achievement: to do so much with so little. Cortes seems to revel in the pacing of the narrative, of deciding precisely when to give the drama some propulsion and when to let it flag, when to let the audience hope, and when to let us despair. At points it almost feels like an experiment, an examination of the nature of narrative suspense, of what makes us tick, as much as showing us what makes Conroy tick. Although one cynical move, which gives a new meaning to the phrase trouser snake, does suggest an exhaustion of dramatic ideas rather than their fruition.
More effective is the claustrophobic setting, aided and abetted by the up-close-and-personal camera work. Not in the visceral sense of 'oh, that's what it would be like to be buried alive', or even 'doesn't Reynolds have thick bristles?', but again in the dramatic sense. Conroy's isolated, impotent situation is ours, the audience's; and his partial, inadequate viewpoint is all that we have to go on. We yearn for some other perspective, some viewpoint that might literally shed light on the darkened proceedings. And it's this prospect that drags us on, that is as vital to us looking for a point as it is to the character looking for a rescue.
Yet if this claustrophobic perspective, this frustrating limit to our knowledge, does seem to open up space for a more interesting film, this space is quickly filled by a really clumsy commentary on the Iraq War. It's this that ruins Buried, not a mobile phone. It removes a certain depth to Buried, digging for it instead a very shallow interpretative grave.
Conroy, we learn, is a truck driver working in Iraq on behalf of an American contractor. As we discover, the bad guys here aren't so much the kidnappers – despite their predilection for YouTube beheadings – as the Coalition of the Willing and Conroy's smarmy employers, both of whom combine bureaucratic indifference with legal slipperiness and sheer disingenuousness. Their willingness to evade responsibility for Conroy becomes all too achingly metaphorical. His mess is Iraq's, too. A mess better buried than confronted.
Which for anyone as unmoved by Reynold's performance as I was does have its benefits. Shouty-angry – and yes voicemail can be annoying – is never going to ingratiate you to any would-be rescuers. Nor will it win you sympathy from an audience, unless brattish prattishness in a confined space is your thing. And the occasional lapses into frat-boy wiseacre mode seem to come from a supercilious place closer, perhaps, to Reynolds, than to a man buried alive somewhere in Iraq.
Michael Moore has a pretty good knack for making documentaries that capture the spirit of their times. Bowling for Columbine (2002), for instance, tapped into the feverish gun control debate in America; Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) was released in the aftermath of the disastrous Iraq War of 2003; Sicko (2007) prefigured the recent US debate on state- run healthcare. In the midst of a serious economic crisis, Capitalism: A Love Story appears to be a timely investigation into bank bailouts, bankruptcies and the return of mass unemployment. So why do all of Moore's stunts, dashed-off analysis and gloomy conclusions in this film feel so tired and out of date?
To begin with, Moore makes an apposite, albeit superficial, comparison between the dying days of Rome and contemporary America. He introduces some clips from what appears to be an old educational reel titled Life in Ancient Rome, which he then juxtaposes with more recent totems of American power, including the Metropolitan Opera House at New York's Lincoln Center draped in the Stars and Stripes. He makes the point that America's long-standing support for the free market has gone the same way as countless failed businesses: from unqualified confidence to directionless decadence. He proceeds to flesh out the scale of corruption in modern American society, using human-interest stories to elicit viewers' anger.
Indeed, his well-worn directorial devices in this latest film reveal his limitations. As in his previous films, Moore inhabits the role of the burly, conscientious documentary-maker on a mission, who nevertheless lets people's stories speak for themselves. He intercuts these testimonials with a morass of kitschy stock footage and B-movie warnings that what we're about to see is 'truly one of the most unusual movies ever made' (except it isn't). The scenes where Moore battles it out with stern-faced corporate security guards and tries to access the high-seats of capitalism through silly stunts have a groaning over-familiarity to them.
As in his previous films, Moore reveals an absolute aversion to the notion of personal responsibility. For example, he blames Ronald Reagan's policy of expanding the availability of credit for a lot of the current economic mess. The film offers the rather lame notion that no individual could possibly have been expected to understand the terms and conditions of the loans they signed their names to and that they were coerced into doing it. But in taking this approach Moore in fact reduces autonomous individuals to hapless victims. As a result, the burden of private debt is all the fault of rapacious financial institutions, riding roughshod over ignorant, ordinary Americans. He then borrows some divine authority from the Catholic Church by simply labelling capitalism as fundamentally 'evil'. Now that's telling 'em.
This is where Capitalism: A Love Story really falls flat. Far from analysing the subprime meltdown, the credit crunch or the slump in productivity in the West, Moore avoids any coherent argument about how and why the crisis happened or why the consequences were so grave. Instead, he blurs and improvises one ill-conceived idea after another, becoming the Miles Davis of moralistic anti-capitalism.
Moore is on firmer ground when he isn't strong-arming security guards or jabbering incoherent theories. The more effective scenes are the straightforward interviews with people who have lost out to unscrupulous employers. In one scene, he visits a widower whose wife was unknowingly insured by her company — a dubious practice called 'dead peasant insurance' — which earned the company quite a substantial amount of money when the woman died. Like many of the stories Moore explores, dead peasant insurance might not be massively revelatory, but it is effective in generating outrage and empathy amongst viewers.
In many ways, it is precisely this kind of posturing that makes Moore's films such hits with liberals on both sides of the pond. In Moore's universe you can appear outraged, concerned and engaged with the world without having to fight for or justify a better alternative. Moore's conclusion, for all the leftist rhetoric in the film's title, suggests that the politics of TINA - There Is No Alternative - is very much alive and well in the US.
Capitalism features strikingly retrograde ideas dressed up as faux radicalism. It's all very well to bemoan 'selfishness' and 'greed' in modern society, but when Moore conflates rational self-interest with anti-social behaviour and disregard for others, he is justifying clampdowns on basic freedoms and rights. By equating individual freedom only with degradation and amorality, he is going some way to legitimising the culture of unfreedom prevalent in both the US and the UK.
Even more disgracefully, he borrows a quote from Roosevelt to suggest that people who are unemployed 'are the stuff of which dictatorships are made'. Raising the spectre of the masses voting for demagogues has long been the conceit of political elites. Moore is foolhardy for repeating it here, especially when the idea of limiting mass democracy looks set to define the new decade.
After two decades of filmmaking, Moore's methods and arguments are essentially the same, but the impact of his films has grown ever weaker. Indeed, Capitalism repeats many of the same tricks and devices used in Moore's 1989 film Roger & Me, about the effect of General Motors downsizing in Flint, Michigan. But whereas that film appeared fresh and amusing 20 years ago, the same shtick – harassing security guards, staging publicity stunts outside corporate offices - is now wearisome, irritating and rather contrived.
The main weakness of Capitalism, though, is that Moore doesn't quite know what to say. In his better films, like Bowling For Columbine and Sicko, his persona as affable, single-minded ordinary bloke was effective, but here the subject matter - capitalism - seems too big and complex for him.
When one Wall Street employee asks Moore 'Why don't you stop making films?', it was one of the few sentiments in the film I could sympathise with.
To begin with, Moore makes an apposite, albeit superficial, comparison between the dying days of Rome and contemporary America. He introduces some clips from what appears to be an old educational reel titled Life in Ancient Rome, which he then juxtaposes with more recent totems of American power, including the Metropolitan Opera House at New York's Lincoln Center draped in the Stars and Stripes. He makes the point that America's long-standing support for the free market has gone the same way as countless failed businesses: from unqualified confidence to directionless decadence. He proceeds to flesh out the scale of corruption in modern American society, using human-interest stories to elicit viewers' anger.
Indeed, his well-worn directorial devices in this latest film reveal his limitations. As in his previous films, Moore inhabits the role of the burly, conscientious documentary-maker on a mission, who nevertheless lets people's stories speak for themselves. He intercuts these testimonials with a morass of kitschy stock footage and B-movie warnings that what we're about to see is 'truly one of the most unusual movies ever made' (except it isn't). The scenes where Moore battles it out with stern-faced corporate security guards and tries to access the high-seats of capitalism through silly stunts have a groaning over-familiarity to them.
As in his previous films, Moore reveals an absolute aversion to the notion of personal responsibility. For example, he blames Ronald Reagan's policy of expanding the availability of credit for a lot of the current economic mess. The film offers the rather lame notion that no individual could possibly have been expected to understand the terms and conditions of the loans they signed their names to and that they were coerced into doing it. But in taking this approach Moore in fact reduces autonomous individuals to hapless victims. As a result, the burden of private debt is all the fault of rapacious financial institutions, riding roughshod over ignorant, ordinary Americans. He then borrows some divine authority from the Catholic Church by simply labelling capitalism as fundamentally 'evil'. Now that's telling 'em.
This is where Capitalism: A Love Story really falls flat. Far from analysing the subprime meltdown, the credit crunch or the slump in productivity in the West, Moore avoids any coherent argument about how and why the crisis happened or why the consequences were so grave. Instead, he blurs and improvises one ill-conceived idea after another, becoming the Miles Davis of moralistic anti-capitalism.
Moore is on firmer ground when he isn't strong-arming security guards or jabbering incoherent theories. The more effective scenes are the straightforward interviews with people who have lost out to unscrupulous employers. In one scene, he visits a widower whose wife was unknowingly insured by her company — a dubious practice called 'dead peasant insurance' — which earned the company quite a substantial amount of money when the woman died. Like many of the stories Moore explores, dead peasant insurance might not be massively revelatory, but it is effective in generating outrage and empathy amongst viewers.
In many ways, it is precisely this kind of posturing that makes Moore's films such hits with liberals on both sides of the pond. In Moore's universe you can appear outraged, concerned and engaged with the world without having to fight for or justify a better alternative. Moore's conclusion, for all the leftist rhetoric in the film's title, suggests that the politics of TINA - There Is No Alternative - is very much alive and well in the US.
Capitalism features strikingly retrograde ideas dressed up as faux radicalism. It's all very well to bemoan 'selfishness' and 'greed' in modern society, but when Moore conflates rational self-interest with anti-social behaviour and disregard for others, he is justifying clampdowns on basic freedoms and rights. By equating individual freedom only with degradation and amorality, he is going some way to legitimising the culture of unfreedom prevalent in both the US and the UK.
Even more disgracefully, he borrows a quote from Roosevelt to suggest that people who are unemployed 'are the stuff of which dictatorships are made'. Raising the spectre of the masses voting for demagogues has long been the conceit of political elites. Moore is foolhardy for repeating it here, especially when the idea of limiting mass democracy looks set to define the new decade.
After two decades of filmmaking, Moore's methods and arguments are essentially the same, but the impact of his films has grown ever weaker. Indeed, Capitalism repeats many of the same tricks and devices used in Moore's 1989 film Roger & Me, about the effect of General Motors downsizing in Flint, Michigan. But whereas that film appeared fresh and amusing 20 years ago, the same shtick – harassing security guards, staging publicity stunts outside corporate offices - is now wearisome, irritating and rather contrived.
The main weakness of Capitalism, though, is that Moore doesn't quite know what to say. In his better films, like Bowling For Columbine and Sicko, his persona as affable, single-minded ordinary bloke was effective, but here the subject matter - capitalism - seems too big and complex for him.
When one Wall Street employee asks Moore 'Why don't you stop making films?', it was one of the few sentiments in the film I could sympathise with.
Austrian film director Michael Haneke's latest, The White Ribbon: A German Children's Story, has already won the Palme d'Or. The chances are it'll pick up Best Foreign Film at next month's Oscars, too. Critics have heaped praise upon it, and art-house audiences have flocked to see it. You see, there's just something about Haneke's work that culture vultures can't stick their beaks into quick enough.
Which, in its way, is puzzling. Not because Haneke is not a talented filmmaker. Far from it, in fact. From their stately structures to the languorous, deliberately disconcerting extended takes, his films are always painstakingly crafted. No detail is accidental, no thing unthought. No, what's puzzling about Haneke's popularity amongst those who take their films nearly as seriously as they take themselves is that his films are so desolating. Almost every review of Haneke's work gushes with the same adjectives: disturbing, disquieting, discomfiting. Haneke's films don't please, they unsettle. They are the artistic equivalent of middle-class masochism.
Funny Games, for instance, was the heartwarming tale of a nice bourgeois family tortured to death by a couple of boys in tennis kit. The Piano Teacher was the groin-girding story of a nice bourgeois society driving a libidinous pianist to torture her genitals. Hidden was an endearing portrait of a nice bourgeois couple tortured to distraction by post- colonial guilt, and unfathomable surveillance. But it's not just the content that is so dismal. Formally, too, his films resist pleasure. Almost without fail they refuse to resolve themselves into anything resembling a conclusion. This is hardly surprising: agency in his work, whether that of psychotic kids or camcorder-wielding stalkers, is without reason. Bad things happen, that's all we on Earth can know.
The White Ribbon: A German Children's Story is no exception to Haneke's rule of thumb – build something dispiriting and the plaudits will come. Set in a German village on the eve of the First World War, it centres around several inexplicable acts of cruelty and misadventure that perplex the small community. The local doctor is sent tumbling from his horse by a trip wire; a female labourer has a fatal accident at the saw mill; the son of the village baron is found hanging upside down in a barn, his backside bleeding following a severe beating. Misfortune and malice continue to afflict the locals. And they, along with us, have no real idea, but plenty of suspicions, as to who is causing this.
The chief suspects are ostensibly the village children, a ghostly bunch that congregate near the houses of victims. Whether this is out of concern or cruelty we are never sure. But Haneke has a deeper motive than creating some Turn of the Screw-style ambiguity around pallid kids, or even a whodunit, with no who and little dunit. His concern, rather, seems to be with a society that breeds cruelty.
Consequently, the village here functions as Haneke's view of society as a whole. It's a study in psychopathology, a portrait of a community in which cruelty is mundane and evil banal. Haneke seems to want us to see this village as an incubator for some coming monstrosity. Little wonder that every relationship is packed full of latent violence, each interactions pregnant with menace. And given the film's pre-First World War German setting, we can be in little doubt that Haneke intends us to see where and when the seeds of fascism were sown.
The problem with all this is that it is so thoroughly hackneyed. The principle unit of socialisation here – the family – is portrayed as little more than a Freudian caricature, which, given that Haneke studied psychology in Vienna, is perhaps apt. Still, that doesn't make it any more edifying an insight. From the doctor 'fingering' his 14-year-old daughter to the pastor tying his son's arms to the bed to stop him from masturbating, abuse and repression is the familial norm here. And so it must be if Haneke is to reduce the brutal extremes of Nazism to a psychological sickness generated in the bosom of the family.
Perverting the great psychoanalyst himself, one child, Erna, asks her teacher 'if you dream of something, really dream of something, can it come true?'. Her dream? The torture and near blinding of the local disabled kid. The suggestion is clear. The routine repression, often cruel, always damaging, is creating psychotic dreamwork, and dreams here, as the eventual torture and near blinding of the local disabled kid show, do become real.
To Haneke, this is just how it is – 'the truth is obscene', he said in a recent interview. All he's doing is making us see. And what a vision it is. In Haneke's films, human society is sunken, rank, a place where mass culture is dumb, where people, turned on and tuned off by TV, are cruel and complacent, and where families will, for time immemorial, f*** you up. Socialisation here is virtually synonymous with corruption.
Why is this vision so popular? What is it about this crass, aloof moralising that is so attractive? The answer lies in the question. In Haneke, every countercultural prejudice, from the perils of consumerism and mainstream entertainment to the denunciation of the family, is given a sophisticated artistic form. Never has liberal snobbery looked so clever.
Which, in its way, is puzzling. Not because Haneke is not a talented filmmaker. Far from it, in fact. From their stately structures to the languorous, deliberately disconcerting extended takes, his films are always painstakingly crafted. No detail is accidental, no thing unthought. No, what's puzzling about Haneke's popularity amongst those who take their films nearly as seriously as they take themselves is that his films are so desolating. Almost every review of Haneke's work gushes with the same adjectives: disturbing, disquieting, discomfiting. Haneke's films don't please, they unsettle. They are the artistic equivalent of middle-class masochism.
Funny Games, for instance, was the heartwarming tale of a nice bourgeois family tortured to death by a couple of boys in tennis kit. The Piano Teacher was the groin-girding story of a nice bourgeois society driving a libidinous pianist to torture her genitals. Hidden was an endearing portrait of a nice bourgeois couple tortured to distraction by post- colonial guilt, and unfathomable surveillance. But it's not just the content that is so dismal. Formally, too, his films resist pleasure. Almost without fail they refuse to resolve themselves into anything resembling a conclusion. This is hardly surprising: agency in his work, whether that of psychotic kids or camcorder-wielding stalkers, is without reason. Bad things happen, that's all we on Earth can know.
The White Ribbon: A German Children's Story is no exception to Haneke's rule of thumb – build something dispiriting and the plaudits will come. Set in a German village on the eve of the First World War, it centres around several inexplicable acts of cruelty and misadventure that perplex the small community. The local doctor is sent tumbling from his horse by a trip wire; a female labourer has a fatal accident at the saw mill; the son of the village baron is found hanging upside down in a barn, his backside bleeding following a severe beating. Misfortune and malice continue to afflict the locals. And they, along with us, have no real idea, but plenty of suspicions, as to who is causing this.
The chief suspects are ostensibly the village children, a ghostly bunch that congregate near the houses of victims. Whether this is out of concern or cruelty we are never sure. But Haneke has a deeper motive than creating some Turn of the Screw-style ambiguity around pallid kids, or even a whodunit, with no who and little dunit. His concern, rather, seems to be with a society that breeds cruelty.
Consequently, the village here functions as Haneke's view of society as a whole. It's a study in psychopathology, a portrait of a community in which cruelty is mundane and evil banal. Haneke seems to want us to see this village as an incubator for some coming monstrosity. Little wonder that every relationship is packed full of latent violence, each interactions pregnant with menace. And given the film's pre-First World War German setting, we can be in little doubt that Haneke intends us to see where and when the seeds of fascism were sown.
The problem with all this is that it is so thoroughly hackneyed. The principle unit of socialisation here – the family – is portrayed as little more than a Freudian caricature, which, given that Haneke studied psychology in Vienna, is perhaps apt. Still, that doesn't make it any more edifying an insight. From the doctor 'fingering' his 14-year-old daughter to the pastor tying his son's arms to the bed to stop him from masturbating, abuse and repression is the familial norm here. And so it must be if Haneke is to reduce the brutal extremes of Nazism to a psychological sickness generated in the bosom of the family.
Perverting the great psychoanalyst himself, one child, Erna, asks her teacher 'if you dream of something, really dream of something, can it come true?'. Her dream? The torture and near blinding of the local disabled kid. The suggestion is clear. The routine repression, often cruel, always damaging, is creating psychotic dreamwork, and dreams here, as the eventual torture and near blinding of the local disabled kid show, do become real.
To Haneke, this is just how it is – 'the truth is obscene', he said in a recent interview. All he's doing is making us see. And what a vision it is. In Haneke's films, human society is sunken, rank, a place where mass culture is dumb, where people, turned on and tuned off by TV, are cruel and complacent, and where families will, for time immemorial, f*** you up. Socialisation here is virtually synonymous with corruption.
Why is this vision so popular? What is it about this crass, aloof moralising that is so attractive? The answer lies in the question. In Haneke, every countercultural prejudice, from the perils of consumerism and mainstream entertainment to the denunciation of the family, is given a sophisticated artistic form. Never has liberal snobbery looked so clever.