Andrew Worsdale
Two movies open this week that show and show-up middle-class values. They savage the bourgeoisie as comfortable claptrap who, ironically enough, will be the ones who go to the art movie houses (where both films are being released) to see themselves being represented and slagged off.
The first is The Happy War, a rather obscure title for an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. (the title comes from a line in the book referring to the war between the sexes). To Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, India) the drab leafy houseplant was seen as sure-fire sign of “guaranteed respectability”. The story follows the travails of Gordon Comstock, a copywriter in an advertising agency, who turns his back on the institutions to become a poet. After a favourable review from The Times he quits his job to be a “free man”, leaving his girlfriend, Rosemary. He ends up working in a Hampstead book shop, and living in dirty digs with an overzealous landlady.
Unfortunately, Rosemary becomes pregnant and he has to give up all his poetic yearnings to rejoin the advertising world as “head of creativity” and settle down with her as a cosy family in a suburban house, becoming middle-class and proper.
Under Robert Bierman’s direction the story becomes a fine-looking and at times charming film. Local-boy-made-good Richard E Grant plays Comstock, while Helena Bonham Carter, who seems like a dwarf opposite Grant, provides the ideal placid antidote to his rantings.
While the film looks good and at times is perfectly witty, one feels that somehow the cynicism inherent in the idea of selling out is a trifle misplaced. It’s almost as if the film-makers believe that the nuclear family is the one that suits mankind best. I’m not sure whether that’s what Orwell intended – surely the point is that the educated but moneyless classes have no choice but to procreate and become boring clones of each other. Somehow I felt the irony was missing.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, and filled with so much edge that it’s a razor blade, is the blackly funny thriller Funny Games by Austrian director Michael Haneke. Some may find it a truly unpleasant movie, but I thought it riveting.
A respectable, upwardly mobile middle-class family of three travel to their lakeside holiday home for a summer of fishing, golfing and boating. Soon after they’ve settled in they are taken hostage by two young men.
This is a psychological family torture drama that has been dealt with many times before in Hollywood cinema. But Haneke plays it as more than a psychodrama and takes an ironic look at the way the media and even he himself portray these kinds of savage encounters between the comfortable bourgeoisie and their tormentors. Several times during the movie one of the malicious kids talks and winks directly at camera and at one point, after a particularly gruesome event, someone grabs the remote of the VCR, replays the scene and redresses the mistake.
It’s a very disturbing movie and director Haneke toys with the audience’s notions of respectability, violence and empathy. He pulls no punches. It is truly refreshing to see a movie without a happy ending. As Haneke himself said in an essay on the picture: “The question is not what may I show? But rather what opportunity do I give the viewer to recognise what is shown for what it is? Specifically on the subject of violence, the problem is not: how do I show the violence, but: how do I show the viewer his own position in relation to violence and its portrayal?”
Some have called Funny Games a nasty, immoral movie, but it’s a far more insightful and amusing (albeit brutal) attack on comfortable bourgeois mores than A Happy War. Haneke exposes modern materialism and middle-class self- satisfaction to maximum effect .
It is sadistic, ironic and totally compelling. If Orwell were alive today I think he’d prefer it, too.
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