Haneke unplugged – consistent themes, early, bare-bones exploration.
The dark mood is set in the first scene: the vandalizing of cars. At once a deeply anti-bourgeois impulse and an act that expresses the faceless anomie of the post-war generation, this film is a melodramatic exploration of teenage resistance to overbearing parents and the constricting influence of a too-small Austrian town. Haneke upends Arcadia (youthful innocence) by transgressing boundaries such as sex out of marriage; smoking; and adultery with an adult. His teens damage cars and otherwise passive-aggressively act against parents. Haneke then subverts the bourgeois fiction of happiness and security by suggesting that in the end our own self-absorption and lack of empathy will relegate our relationships to hostile acts. Read More »