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Film: Lovely Rita
Release date: 9th August 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 76 mins
Director: Jessica Hausner
Starring: Barbara Osika, Christoph Bauer, Peter Fiala, Wolfgang Kostal, Karina Brandlmayer
Genre: Drama
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: Austria/Germany
A portrait of claustrophobic adolescence within the confines of a bourgeois Catholic Austrian family, the ‘lovely Rita’ of the title appears to be a typical brooding teenager, but there are darker consequences to this seemingly everyday tale.
Rita is an only child who displays classic adolescent truculence in response to the strictures of her family and school. Her parents lead a life hidebound by convention and routine – socialising with the neighbours, shooting birds for sport, and repeatedly berating Rita for her sullen attitude. There is an uneasy imbalance of power within the family, where the father’s unpredictable temper creates an atmosphere of constant tension, and the mother seems to enforce the father’s tyrannies with a smile of twisted satisfaction.
School offers no respite for Rita. She is ostracized by her classmates, whose apparent good manners and piety provide an effective veneer for their maliciousness. Her only friend is one of the neighbour’s sons, Fexi, a boy of frail health several years younger than her. The scenes with Rita and Fexi provide the only real warmth in the film, as they give vent to the playfulness of youth or express their emotions in ironically theatrical dancing.
But Rita jeopardises this friendship when her sexual advances to Fexi are discovered by his family. With this avenue of affection closed to her, she develops an unhealthy interest in the local bus driver. Repeatedly feigning illness or inventing excuses to leave school to follow him, her overt attention eventually leads to a seedy encounter in the toilets of a nightclub.
The recklessness of Rita’s behaviour creates a growing sense of foreboding. When she kidnaps the seriously ill Fexi from hospital, her lack of empathy for the physical danger she is placing him in, despite his evident uneasiness and distrust, imply borderline psychosis rather than mere teenage rebellion. Rita’s destructiveness escalates to bring the film to its dramatic conclusion…
The seemingly everyday nature of the film’s subject and setting is reinforced by the way the film was made. Shot on digital video, the low production values and subject matter are reminiscent of educational films made for schools, while the drab ‘70s decor and clothes – even though the action is present day - lend an air of Abigail’s Party to the bourgeois social life of Rita’s parents. Director Jessica Hausner used a non-professional cast for the film, and on a superficial glance you might believe yourself to be watching a fly on the wall documentary, featuring unremarkable people in an amateurish piece of filming.
But the film’s lack of ‘filminess’ perversely reinforces the impact of the story. This is not a poetically beautiful depiction of teenage alienation. There is no soundtrack to ameliorate the darkness of the film’s themes. Rita, although pretty, is no poster girl for adolescent angst, with her permanently lank greasy hair. In the film’s bleak view of humanity, we aren’t given any explanation of the inner life of any of the characters, and there is a lack of understanding or communication between them.
The film’s amateur cast cope well with their task. Barbara Osika’s nuanced portrayal of taciturn misery is full of conviction, and Christopher Hauer, playing the young Fexi, gives a very naturalistic performance. The scene where they giggle and dance together is one of the best in the film, conveying a genuine feeling of warmth and pleasure in each other’s company. In contrast, the dark undercurrents of the relationships in Rita’s family are expressed in anger and unvoiced disappointment. Karina Brandlmeyer plays Rita’s mother with an almost robotic resignation to her family role. Wolfgang Kostal effectively conveys the steely grip of an emotional tyrant on his family, creating an atmosphere of trepidation as his wife and daughter watch and wait for the next outburst of irrational anger.
The most troubling aspect of the family dynamic is that, every time Rita does something which is genuinely disturbing – such as abducting Fexi from the hospital – her parents make no attempt to question her or reason with her. They merely lock her in her bedroom for this, but her father will shout at her for the terrible transgression of leaving the toilet lid up. Although silence is commonly the weapon of teenagers, a defence against being patronised or misunderstood, it’s also a weapon here for adults to maintain the status quo and retain control. A pessimistic picture is painted of the helplessness of adolescence within a society which is concerned with bourgeois family appearances, and which displays an empty and mechanical piety with no moral honesty or belief to underpin it.
The low tech production values create a surprisingly effective medium for this bleak exploration of family life. Not the most uplifting viewing experience, but an honest and brave approach at portraying the familiar theme of adolescent alienation in a harsh and realistic light. KR
Film: Hotel
Release date: 9th August 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 83 mins
Director: Jessica Hausner
Starring: Franziska Weisz, Birgit Minichmayr, Marlene Streeruwitz, Rosa Waissnix, Christopher Scharf
Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Drama
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: Austria/Germany
Director Jessica Hausner’s fourth film follows the experiences of a young woman who comes to work at a quiet hotel in an isolated forest location. Her predecessor disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Will she fall victim of the same unknown fate?
A sense of unease pervades the hotel as Irene’s duties there commence with a tour of the building, beginning in the deserted basement, lit by flickering fluorescent lights in classic horror film style. Irene is young and inexperienced, away from home for the first time, and further isolated by having to live in a room in the hotel formerly inhabited by Eva, her ill-fated predecessor, while local employees live in the nearby town.
The staff at the hotel are oddly cold and unfriendly. The police make brief appearances, questioning staff regarding the disappearance of Eva, or dredging the pond in the grounds for evidence - although their actions are never elucidated, and the outcome of their investigations never explained.
Irene is further disturbed by a primitive doll displayed in a glass case at the hotel. This is apparently in reference to a local legend - the Lady of the Woods, a woman who lived in a cave nearby during the 16th century, healing the sick with her knowledge of herbs, until accused of sorcery and burnt at the stake. Irene dreams repeatedly of walking down a corridor in the hotel towards an unknown darkness. As hostility towards her among the staff increases, there is a growing sense of fear and menace, with the film’s inevitably dark conclusion almost coming as a relief from the accumulation of seemingly trivial yet disturbing incidents at the hotel…
The film’s location in a dark hotel in the woods is a classic setting for a conventional horror film, but Hotel produces something far more unexpected. A sense of unease builds through the film’s understated performances, sparse dialogue, austere aesthetics and evocation of alienation and isolation. It is shot with a stark colour palette – grey, white, brown, black, forest green and terracotta. The banal ugliness of the hotel’s interior creates a feeling of unhomeliness, the failure of its polyester attempts at cosiness only highlighting the unsettling inhumanity of such a place. Even more disturbingly, the woods surrounding the hotel don’t evoke the peace and beauty of nature. Their unnaturally perpendicular and regular tree trunks are reminiscent of a stage set, claustrophobically artificial and darkly lit.
The careful use of sound in the film also contributes to a strong sense of loneliness. The silence of the building is broken only by harsh, everyday noises – the creaking of the manager’s shoes, a key turning in a lock, the tinny kitsch of elevator muzak. Irene’s dreams are pervaded by a noise like radio interference, which cuts to the muted whine of the hotel alarm. In the woods, there is a humming sound but its source – a plane? running water? – is not identified, increasing the sense of unease. The failure of dialogue to produce any understanding or warmth only emphasises the insurmountable silence. Conversations are perfunctory or hostile. Irene has a date with a man from the local town, but, during their brief conversation, he misunderstands a question she asks him, his self-satisfied smile emphasising the lack of empathy between them. He spends the night with her, but this just seems to be a further failed attempt by Irene to make an emotional connection with anyone in the film.
Much of the success of the film hangs on Franziska Weisz’s performance as Irene. She conveys an apprehension which is itself fearful of discovery and articulation, of being ridiculed or judged. Her subtly conveyed aura of profound unhappiness suggests the inevitability of a catastrophic fate – whether due to the cruelty of her colleagues, or to the possibility of supernatural dangers lying within or outside the hotel. The truculent sexuality of Birgit Minichmayr’s performance as the jealous colleague Petra provides a strong foil to Irene’s reticent nervousness.
There are obvious parallels with two other horror films. The dark corridors of the hotel, leading to who knows what fearful places, are reminiscent of The Shining, while the legend of the witch in the woods, associated with the disappearance of a hiking party decades earlier, has echoes of The Blair Witch Project. Enjoyable as Jack Nicholson playing psychotic may be, Hotel is a far more understated matter than either of those films. There is no darkly melodramatic dialogue hinting at Eva’s fate, or horrors revealed hidden behind basement doors. The only “scream” moment is a silent one, all the more effective for its suggestion of the paralysis of a scream in a nightmare. Director Jessica Hausner has said that the type of horror films which feature monsters provide a form of relief for the audience, as they give fear a face; her aim in Hotel, instead, was to explore the essence of fear itself.
What Hotel successfully creates is that sense of what Freud called the “unheimlich” or “unhomely” – the uncanny nature of that which is familiar to us, yet subtly, disturbingly out of kilter. The setting of the hotel is banal and everyday, yet disconsonant elements accumulate. The absent Eva acts as a double to Irene – even her discarded glasses fit when Irene tries them on – and her disappearance calls into question the reality of Irene’s existence as an individual, and the possibility that that existence can be allowed to continue. The film raises questions which are never answered. Is the disappearance of Irene’s necklace and the smashing of her glasses an act of human malice, or is there a supernatural influence emanating from the woods? Do Irene’s dreams of the hotel corridor prefigure some horrific revelation yet to come? If so, why is there a sense of calmness and relief when she walks into the darkness waiting at the end of the corridor? The final image of Irene in her red uniform dwarfed by the black woods is a powerful one, echoing the primitive fear of fairytales, a modern day Little Red Riding Hood entering the Germanic forest.
The film’s atmosphere is cleverly and coherently constructed through its stark and minimal aesthetics, understated performances and sparse dialogue. Although it may be billed as a horror, it’s the antithesis of cheesy or gory examples of that genre, while some viewers may find its open ended conclusion frustrating. A strangely gripping and artful story, subtly horrific in its depiction of human isolation. KR
Film: Lourdes
Release date: 26th March 2010
Certificate: U
Running time: 97 mins
Director: Jessica Hausner
Starring: Sylvie Testud, Lea Seydoux, Bruno Todeschini, Elina Lowensohn
Genre: Drama
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: Cinema
Country: France
Sometimes calling a film strange, mysterious or puzzling is a high compliment – and this is such a case. It’s haunting, but always engaging, and will leave you wondering what it all means for many a week.
Testud plays Christine, wheelchair-bound as a multiple sclerosis sufferer, who is on a visit to Lourdes. She is bright and slightly cynical, and we learn that this is the latest in a series of visits around Europe to places of pilgrimage. Christine doesn’t believe in miracles, but goes through the routine of visiting the holy sights, being blessed with the water and bathing in the pools, but with the expression of resignation rather than hope.
Her attitude changes when she spies Kuno (Todeschini), a handsome member of the Order of Malta (who help the disabled), and they strike up a friendship. The problem is he seems rather more interested in Christine’s carer Maria (Seydoux), who lacks intelligence but has a body and face absolutely bursting with health and vitality. Christine’s face is as fragile and pale as her poor, broken frame.
Against all the odds, Christine rises out of her wheelchair. Is it a miracle? The religious folk seem convinced, the medical team less so – but it certainly gets Kuno’s attention. It also creates a huge amount of resentment – after all, some of the visitors have visited Lourdes for years with no joy, while she is on her first visit and doesn’t even believe in it all…
At its heart, Lourdes is a film about the importance of belief, over cynicism. Lourdes is portrayed as a horrendous Disneyland but with longer queues, and the Order of Malta staff are more interested in wine and playing cards than in looking after the disabled. Yet despite all of that, Christine does appear to go through a change, brought on by – well, what? Longing? Desire? Belief?
There’s a particularly painful moment when a mentally ill girl appears healed, only for it to become the cruellest of illusions, and the look on her mother’s face is almost unbearable.
Despite tackling such profound subjects, Lourdes is a consistently witty film, with a wry sense of humour, and one outright funny joke – told by a vicar, no less. But it’s the performance of Testud as the brittle Christine which ultimately makes this so intriguing. Her body may be broken but her face tells a whole lifetime’s worth of stories.
A remarkable portrayal of a character who never attracts pity or sentimentality. A puzzle, but one you’ll enjoy trying to solve. MM
Jessica Hausner was born in 1972 in Vienna, Austria. She studied directing at the Filmakademie of Vienna, where in 1996 she made the short film Flora, winning the Léopard de Demain at the Locarno Festival.
'Inter-view', her graduation film, won the Prix du Jury of the Cinéfondation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999.
Two years later, 'Lovely Rita', her first feature film, was presented in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival before being distributed in twenty territories. Her second feature film 'Hotel' was again selected in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival 2004, and won the Grand Prix for the Best Austrian Feature at the Diagonale 2005. 'Lourdes' is her third film…
Why did you set your film in Lourdes?
First and foremost, I wanted to make a film about a miracle. Miracles represent a paradox, a fissure in the logic that carries us towards death, and the expectation of a miracle suggests a hope that everything will turn out well in the end, and that there is someone watching over us.
I did a lot of research in order to find a good setting to tell a story about a miracle. I settled on the particular case of Lourdes because I wanted to accentuate the fact that the pilgrims go there in hope of experiencing a miracle. One would think, at first glance, that the miracle could only be a positive thing: a paralytic is suddenly healed. However, during my research into stories about healings, I came upon cases in which the healed person subsequently relapsed: the miracle didn’t last. There’s a parallel here with the arbitrary aspect of life: certain things seem marvellous, even miraculous, which then become horrible or merely banal.
In your film, miracles are also associated with the idea of success…
Indeed. People who are cured miraculously often ask themselves what they did to 'succeed', that’s to say to be ‘awarded’ a miracle. Is it possible to be ambitious, to conduct oneself as a good Christian in order to attain healing, or are miracles arbitrary? It’s a very important contradiction in my film, the fact that on one hand, sick people hope, and behave according to this hope, while on the other hand they are never certain of being compensated.
When Christine is miraculously cured, she immediately asks herself ‘Why me?’ – all the more so because she wasn’t a particularly believing person when she arrived in Lourdes. She asks herself if she is expected to do something to legitimize her miracle.
At the beginning of your project, were religious institutions sceptical about how faith would be represented in your film?
We had numerous conversations with Monsignor Perrier, Bishop of Tarbes and of Lourdes, about the way that Lourdes would be represented. We also discussed miracles with theologians. We all ask ourselves these questions, and the church is supposed to provide an answer. What’s interesting is that these catholic dignitaries are themselves conscious of the ambivalence of miracles. The question of the meaning of life is at the centre of my film and at the centre of the church’s reflections as well.
Few fiction films are set in Lourdes... Did you have difficulties obtaining authorization to shoot there?
I went to Lourdes several times while looking for locations. Over the course of a very in-depth research period, a mutual understanding evolved between the people in charge of the sanctuaries and myself, and we received authorization to shoot there after a year.
You worked for the first time in France with Lourdes. How did that happen?When I made the decision to shoot in Lourdes, in the French language, I thought this could allow me to look at this universe with a virgin gaze, and thus achieve a distanced perspective on what Lourdes represents and what these people are doing there…
After the family unit of Lovely Rita and the labyrinthine interiors of Hotel, the city of Lourdes is the exclusive setting of this film. Are you attracted to closed interiors, inaccessible areas or exclusive situations to tell your stories?
Yes, very much. The location and the setting are very important to me because they constitute a way of describing society visually. With each film, I try to find a unique place, a closed and isolated place that helps me develop a parabolic narrative… I need a closed space, as well as particular clothing, because they help me develop the story. In Hotel the characters wear the uniforms of the hotel, in Lovely Rita they wear scholarly uniforms, and in Lourdes we have the uniforms of the Order of Malta. I strive to make the characters less individualistic, conceiving them rather as prototypes which form a religious or social system. I’m personally conscious of living inside of a system, and that this partly influences my character. I either do or do not do what is expected of me, and this defines who I am. I am part of society and I play my role in it. This is sometimes a source of tension because that to which I aspire is not necessarily what society can offer me. In my film, I try to describe such a system, one in which each person plays a role.
Why did you choose the Order of Malta?
The Order of Malta is also a system, and it poses the same questions as the social system in general. What obligations are within its hierarchy? I found it interesting to observe such things at the heart of this order, where people behave not on an individual basis, but in relation to the group’s expectations. It’s the thread that runs through my films: the relationship between one’s role in society and one’s own identity. What power do I have? What obligations? Who am I, and who should I be? My films reflect the idea that one can’t find a solution to this…
How did the actors respond to this very catholic world?Some actresses refused to play a paralyzed woman because they felt that the role wasn’t ’sexy’ enough and might damage their careers. Other questioned the catholic content of the film. I explained that although the story takes place in Lourdes, the film isn’t intended to be particularly catholic. I used the setting of Lourdes to tell a more general story…
At the beginning of the film, it’s almost as if the character Sylvie Testud plays doesn’t have a body: she appears gradually, and then disappears again. How did you come to understand this role with your actress?Sylvie Testud understood the film immediately, the fact that it’s not a tragedy in which the main character is a young girl who is paralyzed, but rather a parable in which she is a symbol.
The production was difficult for her because the more we shot, the more it became difficult for her to handle the absence of her body. She could only move her face and this situation frustrated her; she felt in the depths of her body what it means to be handicapped. It was a very powerful experience for both of us.
How did you work to prepare her role?
The preparation phase was quite long. Sylvie Testud and I visited several hospital complexes to meet sick people, and each visit helped us to understand the disease a little better: on one hand there are personal, familial and social anxieties, while on the other there is the physical experience of being strapped to a wheelchair. We also worked with a physiotherapist to understand how Sylvie should walk at the end of the film. What was extremely interesting for us was to emotionally enter into a fatal situation, to be handicapped, and to find there a kind of normalcy and unexpected sense of well-being. Day after day life continues, however it is.
The actors’ performances appear precise, very controlled. How did you work with them?
First I develop a very precise shooting script. I draw a storyboard to determine the camera movements and to establish the composition of the images. I follow this storyboard very closely during production.
As for the actors’ performances, my goal is to establish the fact that these people are organized by a system, as if the actors comprised a ballet troupe dancing according to the rules of a dance, a choreography of the society in which they live. On the set, I compose the image, and then I inform the actors of their positions and movements. The first tries are usually mechanical enough, but as soon as the actors learn how to move within this constricted setting, they start to ‘live’ inside the scene and the film comes to life. I expect from the actors that they remain very lively within this framework. That’s what is difficult about this working method… Léa Seydoux, for example, is a very lively and intuitive actress who brought a lot of naturalism to her role, but it was sometimes difficult to keep her inside this framework! Men remain in the margins in your films. They embody power: as priests, officers of The Order of Malta, doctors or fathers.
How does masculine power influence your heroines?The main character is a woman. The men for their part belong to the institutions, and embody positions in their hierarchies. I think that institutional power and authority are terrible, because they are nothing but a facade hiding an empty core. Men in powerful positions disturb my female characters, who sink into a sort of void when they realize that this system of authority is without substance.
My female characters often learn over the course of the film that this masculine authority can’t provide them with answers. They are disabled by it.
Your film goes beyond Lourdes and Catholicism. What type of faith are you interrogating?The film interrogates the ways in which we can give meaning to life by our actions. Contrasted with this idea is the fear that the world is cold and bleak, without profound meaning, and that one is born by chance and dies in the same way and that nothing one does in life is of any import. The truth is difficult to find: our lives are at once wonderful and banal.
The film’s point of view is more philosophical than religious…
Yes, it tends towards a general line of questioning. I am interested, however, in the emotion that accompanies the religious sentiment. To have faith is to believe that something exists that can’t be explained, and which exceeds the limits of our comprehension. Believers call it God. Faith allows one to accept that miracles can happen – that’s the essence of faith. A miracle exists in my film: something ‘miraculous’ occurs, but afterwards it becomes rather banal. Thus one realizes that this ‘miracle’ doesn’t contain a moral or a meaning - that it’s perhaps only a coincidence. It’s only a temporary stage because nothing is certain.
Lourdes is not the story of a healing, but rather like a Russian doll in that one opens one shell after another without every arriving at the centre…
Where you influenced by other films?With my previous film, Hotel, I made a lot more references to other films because it played with the genre of the horror film. With Lourdes I was freer, even if a film like Dreyer’s Ordet inspired me a lot with the subject. The films of Jaques Tati were influential to me for their humour.
Could one interpret your miracle – in the style of Lazarus, or ‘Rise up and walk’ – as homage to the power of faith?No, because the person miraculously healed is not someone of particularly strong faith. The miracle in my film is beautiful, but it’s a bit as if it weren’t caused by anything, or anyone.
Why is your style composed of long, planned sequences that are often static, with the exception of crowd movements?There aren’t only static shots, but also camera movements and zooms. My compositions tend towards images that explain how the group functions. At a certain moment in the film, there’s a group photo: the individuals seem to melt into the mass. The photo’s composition is telling: on the left are the women (of the Order of Malta), in the middle are the sick people and on the right are the knights. After the shot, the ensemble dissolves back into chaos. That little scene contains the whole story that I wanted to tell.
Why do you show the prayers, the visits to the cave and the baths in their duration, and not in a more elliptical manner?I showed the elements of the pilgrimage process: the rituals, the venues… The true ellipsis is elsewhere, for the film makes an economy of the essential: the flaw in the logic, the reason for the miracle.
Why do the white curtains play such a principal role?I’m playing with the idea that something is hidden behind the curtain. What exactly? That’s the question. I’m talking about the unknown, that which escapes us intellectually, that which is emotionally foreign to us. But after that, when one glances behind the curtain, one sees something terribly banal. In Hotel, the character discovers a parking lot behind the curtain, and in Lourdes the curtain is hiding a cleansing ritual with the holy water of Lourdes. One draws back the curtain but doesn’t find answers. The meaning escapes us once again.
At times the lighting in Lourdes seems to ‘illuminate’ your characters, though without bathing them in a ‘sacred’ atmosphere…I was mindful that the light should not create a sacred atmosphere, or evoke the presence of a being or superior force. I also avoided alluding to a superior force with crane movements, for example. I prefer a solution like the one in Dreyer’s Ordet: when a car’s headlights sweep across a wall, a madman sees the arrival of death and the family perceives the arrival of the doctor’s car. The doctor arrives, and five minutes later the sick man is dead. Everyone was right: the light on the wall was at once a premise of death and the headlights of a car. I think it’s magnificent when a director finds an aesthetic that reflects this paradox and ambiguity…
Could one say, in summary, that your film revolves around a mystery?
A miracle questions the meaning of things. Can I influence the course of my destiny through my good actions, or am I nothing more than a balloon in the claws of chance? This contrast between the meaningful and the arbitrary is the heart of this story. It’s for this reason that after being miraculously cured, Christine says ‘I hope I’m the right person’. AE
