Michael first published by Little White Lies, 20 Jan 2012
Returning home one evening, Michael (Michael Fuith) shares a meal with surly ten-year-old Wolfgang (David Reuchenberger), lets the boy watch TV till nine, then puts him to bed. Later, he unlocks Wolfgang’s downstairs room – the camera lingering for a beat on the door closed behind him. Michael is next seen washing his cock in the upstairs bathroom, and putting a strange mark in his diary. Cut to the title, and to the realisation that this bland, anal-retentive insurance salesman has been keeping the abducted Wolfgang in his basement as a sex slave, possibly for some years.
Markus Schleinzer’s directorial debut Michael is an austere Austrian tale of domestic imprisonment and abuse that evokes two of the nation’s causes célèbres: the notoriously calculating real-life paedophile Josef Fritzl, and Austria’s filmmaking enfant terrible Michael Haneke. The latter is explicitly thanked in the closing credits, for Michael has been forged in the Haneke mould, treating its incendiary material with an aloof, banalising calm, and withholding any overt judgment or moral standpoint. Meanwhile this does for Boney M’s Sunny what Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) did for Singin’ in the Rain: sullying its upbeat tones with the most sinister of associations.
When Wolfgang complains that there are two pieces missing from his jigsaw set, Michael’s response – “You can still see what it is” – encapsulates Schleinzer’s elliptical approach to filmmaking. As the camera tracks Michael from a cool distance, we see a man whose relations outside the home – commercial, familial, social, even sexual – seem ordinary, even successful, but it is Wolfgang, missing from all these scenes, whose very absence furnishes the bigger picture (and creates real tension the longer that he remains unseen). Conversely, although Schleinzer thankfully avoids any graphic presentation of sexual abuse, he nonetheless shows a relationship which, though now settled into a veneer of wary normalcy and routine, is clearly rooted in control, confinement and cruelty – and so leaves the viewer to fill in the unspeakable blanks. It is a truly unsettling portrait of an everyday cypher whose own inhuman urges imprison him as much as his young captive – and there is not even a hint of tabloid demonisation.
strap: Markus Schleinzer’s Fritzl-inflected domestic drama uses cool surfaces and unspeakable depths to show the banality of everyday evil
Anton Bitel
