Salon.com > Michael Haneke

Juliette Binoche on her new Tuscan-seductress role

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:01:00 +0000

In "Certified Copy," the first Western film from the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Juliette Binoche plays a high-strung French journalist, whose name we never learn, who takes a visiting English author on a car trip through Tuscany. Ostensibly, she wants James (played by British opera singer William Shimell, in his film debut) to see a famous 18th-century forgery of a Roman painting, one so good it is called the "Original Copy." His book, you see, is a theoretical art-history text arguing that for practical purposes there is no difference between a copy and an original.

But even before the journey begins, the journalist's 10-year-old son has joked that she's decided to fall in love with James, and her behavior around him is oddly imperious and demanding. When a cafe proprietor in some picturesque village makes the obvious assumption -- that she and James are married -- Binoche's character pounces on it: It's been 15 years, my husband works all the time, I never see him, we fight a lot. James returns from making a phone call to persons unknown (perhaps his real wife or girlfriend) and gradually gets dragged into the game. As the pair continue their odyssey through a Tuscan afternoon, sparring like a couple who really have been together 15 years, the movie's real question comes into focus: How does a forgery or copy of a relationship compare with the so-called real thing?

DVDs you should have seen — but didn’t

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Let me save you some time, along with wear and tear on those e-mailin' fingers. Yes, the title of this sporadic feature is obnoxious, and the DVDs reviewed are (in some but not all cases) almost willfully obscure. That's pretty much the point! I mean, look: "Kick-Ass" is out on DVD too. But let's think about that for a second: You don't care what I think about that movie, and neither do I. Are we clear?

I've neglected this franchise for so long that I had to winnow down insanely to get to an initial list of 25 or 30, and then just pick the final 10 (actually 11) by pure whim and/or recent release date. I could do an entirely different list of DVDs released before May, not to mention the veritable gold mine that lies ahead of us in August. I could have done a list that read even more like an infomercial for the Criterion Collection than this one does. So ritual apologies to the publicists who torment my mail carrier, and we'll get to some more discs soon.

“Ajami”: Israel’s gritty answer to “Crash”

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:20:00 +0000

I'm afraid it sounds like damning with faint praise to compare the Israeli Oscar-nominated film "Ajami" to Paul Haggis' "Crash," but, honestly, it's just a frame of reference. (Fernando Meirelles' "City of God" will do almost as well.) "Ajami" is almost entirely free of the coruscating sentimentality and absurd coincidence that defined Haggis' Oscar sweeper, and its intimate vision of lives lived on both sides of the Arab-Jewish dividing line is sympathetic but overwhelmingly tragic. Set mainly in the eponymous neighborhood of Jaffa, the largely Arab town just south of Tel Aviv, "Ajami" uses its episodic structure, overlapping chronologies and large ensemble cast to depict interlocking communities that live in close physical proximity yet remain alien to each other and trapped in a cycle of pointless, bitter violence.

Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon”

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 02:01:00 +0000

I don't know whether Michael Haneke ever plays chess or poker (the former seems a lot more likely). But either way, he'd be a deadly opponent. Mild-mannered, formal and professorial, the bearded Austrian filmmaker is not a difficult interview subject in any ordinary sense. He was neither grouchy nor combative in our half-hour conversation. He was unfailingly polite, never refused to answer a question and even cracked one or two quiet jokes.

But I gradually became aware that the director of "Caché," "The Piano Teacher" and the new international sensation "The White Ribbon" -- winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes and best-film and best-director prizes at the recent European Film Awards -- was steering our discussion exactly as he wished. Beneath his calm and courteous demeanor, Haneke exerts an inexorable, iceberg-like confidence, which you can also see in his films. With minimal effort, he brushed away my attempts to link his work to his background or his private life, and calmly insisted that the unanswered questions and unfinished narratives in his films -- the very ingredients that fascinate viewers -- are unimportant and superficial.