pgeary6001

Haneke is a challenging auteur. He method of protesting screen violence is by counterintuitively filling the screen with grotesque carnage (see Funny Games and its remake, and Benny's Video).

Here, thankfully, the violence is mainly psychic and emotional, as the characters seek meaning and connection in a world that seems cruel and indifferent. The first part of the two halves is engaging and generally skilfully executed, although it's hard to sympathise with the vandalism and selfishness of the teenage protagonists.

Part two picks up the story twenty years later and is a disappointment, striking me as a second-rate Bergman pastiche. As in Bergman, a clergyman is confronted with a lost soul seeking meaning and is unable to help. The characters deliver gloomy commentaries on the hollowness of human existence, and for the most part treat each other badly. I think we've seen all this before.

It's all like an anticipated football match in which the first half builds interest and excitement, all of which dissipates in a listless and meandering second half.

If Haneke wanted to make his audience feel suicidal as this dreary effort plodded tediously to its conclusion, he very nearly succeeded. This film was neither insightful nor thought-provoking. Instead, it was an adolescent exercise in self-indulgent nihilism. I hope those poor fish didn't really die during the filming of this turkey.

Evidently, we're supposed to conclude that "consumerism" drove this family to self-annihilation. But affluence itself was never meant to provide purpose or spiritual nourishment. Instead, it frees one to find meaning and purpose in other ways, rather than spending all one's time scratching out a meagre existence.

If this moronic couple wanted meaning in their lives, they had endless opportunities in modern Austria to volunteer and help others that could have given their existence meaning.

How many people could have been helped by the money these narcissists flushed down the toilet? How many poorer families could have used the furnishings and appliances that this couple destroyed?

And, of course, there is the issue of the anguish this couple caused to their parents and other relations, particularly by including their child in this sick endeavour. Their cruelty and selfishness is repellent and self-defeating.

Haneke bringing this to the screen is a self-indulgence that isn't edgy or provocative. It's just adolescent and ultimately distasteful. The repetitive scenes of destruction towards the end of the film are particularly gratuitous and tiresome.

This film serves no purpose. It is clearly not entertainment and its rationale is juvenile and sophomoric. I could get this much nihilism a lot faster in a two-minute punk song and be far better entertained.

This film captures beautifully the question at the heart of Lawrence's book: can a man experience the sensual love of a woman while simultaneously experiencing the platonic love of a male friend?

I think most of us now would reply "Yes, of course," but Lawrence himself struggled with this throughout his life. The film depicts the male-female erotic coupling in great detail, while the wrestling scene is not erotic in a homosexual sense, but an expression of male bonding on brutally honest, stripped-down terms...two men connecting through combat, naked as in the days of the original Olympics.

Alan Bates (representing Lawrence through his character) feels the connection forged through the wrestling as an honourable and masculine form of love, yet Reed's character is sadly unable to understand the nature of this connection.

The film juxtaposes sex with death continually throughout the narrative; and after all, the act of orgasm has been widely characterised as a "little death." The players are constantly seeking to feel truly alive, despite the risks this entails to them personally and in their relationships. The yearning for connection and a deep feeling of the life force in the end leads to tragic consequences for some, while others never give up hope.

This is Ken Russell's masterpiece and career highs for Alan Bates and Glenda Jackson, along with the rest of the remarkable cast.