Not to be confused with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s profound 1924 Michael (Mikaël), the new Michael, by Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer, is far from a masterwork; in fact it is the most revolting new movie since ’s Funny Games.
Schleinzer (who was casting director on Haneke’s Children of the Corn-type epic The White Ribbon) plays a similar game as Haneke, testing the audience’s sense of outrage by dispassionately telling the story of a pedophile, Michael (Michael Fuith) who kidnaps a child (David Rauchenberger) whom he molests and keeps imprisoned in a cellar.
That the abducted child is only an incidental character makes the film infuriating. Schleinzer is more interested in showing the perfidy of the pedophile, not to understand him but to coolly observe his peculiarity (hiding his feelings at an insurance company desk job, pretending to have a girlfriend in another town) while he shuts off regular adult relationships (an attempt at heterosexual normalcy ends nastily).
Schleinzer seems inured to the child’s suffering and titillated by Michael’s banal sickness (as in singing Christmas carols—the expected anti-religious bit). But this affectless approach is just a perverse kind of sensationalism; it permits vile behavior and dreadful eventualities (Michael exposing himself, seducing the child, the child’s pitiful attempts at escape) while ruling out the possibilities of goodness or resolution.
This technique is in the numb, uninflected style popular among today’s cinephiles. In reacting against the dramatic methods of classical filmmaking, they’ve made demigods of directors like Haneke, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and especially the David Fincher of Zodiac.
Bland sensationalism is part of the nihilistic point of view that rejects emotional involvement and sees empathy as pointless. There is no hope or morality, just misunderstanding, exploitation and abuse. This worldview doesn’t make Michael profound, it exemplifies how depraved our film culture has become. Critics and festival circuit folk who obviously don’t know the Dreyer film accept Schleinzer’s foul proposition, accepting its deliberate malaise as basic and profound.
Consider how different Dreyer’s silent film Michael is in its audacious story of an established artist’s attraction to a young painter. It was the first cinematic masterpiece that also happened to observe homoeroticism—the older painter (known as the Master of Suffering) created art works that depicted the depth of loneliness and despair yet were sensitive to beauty.
Schleinzer’s Michael is just an inscrutable pervert. He seeks a companion for his captive by cruising a kid’s stock car course where Schleinzer—in the film’s set piece—tracks alongside Michael as he eludes being caught. It’s Schleinzer’s nihilism that is most perverted; it accepts tabloid atrocity as the order of the day.
This Michael is only worth writing about in order to warn against it and give alarm about the tendency in contemporary film culture to be enthralled by art movie inhumanity. The lingering shot of child and adult working together on a puzzle is one of the most presumptuous pieces of symbolism in movie history.
Schleinzer’s agonizing narrative distance is no smarter than the horror films that stupidly delay a victim’s rescue in order to heighten suspense. Schleinzer thinks imagining the worst that could happen is sophisticated.
