Michael Haneke's Film Noir

Michael Haneke is so tied to a particular dark and disturbing style of filmmaking — his subjects have included child murderers, suicide, sexual repression and sadomasochism — that interviewers are often surprised by the twinkly-eyed grandfather they meet in person.

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• The Palme d'Or

The Austrian director is known for his contradictions. A former film critic and television producer, Haneke, 67, prides himself on being an art-house provocateur and a fierce critic of big-budget, Hollywood movies. And yet his films have recently started to attract more mainstream audiences and enjoy commercial success. Four years after his thriller Hidden earned a respectable $16 million at the box office worldwide, he is garnering critical acclaim and snapping up awards for his latest film, The White Ribbon. The movie, released this fall in Europe and set to open in December in the U.S., won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is generating Oscar buzz as a possible candidate for best foreign film. (See pictures of the red carpet at Cannes.)

Just don't expect him to be wrapped up in awards talk. Haneke takes a very pragmatic view of his newfound popularity. "Awards are important for all directors because they improve your working conditions," he says. "You're only as good as your last film, so if you get prizes or large audiences, then you get more money for your next film." But success and money is unlikely to change his style. Throughout his career, Haneke hasn't attracted controversy so much as courted it and if his films are looked upon as bleak diatribes on the human condition, frankly, he doesn't care. He first turned stomachs in 1989 with The Seventh Continent, which is based on a true story and depicted a young German family driven to commit suicide by the banalities of everyday life. In his next film, Benny's Video, the parents of a teenager who has shot dead a schoolgirl mull over how to dispose of the girl's body as though it were a bowl of leftover noodles threatening to block their drains.

In 2001, he released the shocking The Piano Teacher, in which Isabelle Huppert plays a sexually repressed woman living in bourgeois Austrian society. She acts out her sadomasochistic fantasies by watching porn, sniffing semen-soaked tissues and cutting her genitals with a razor blade before embarking on an affair with a 17-year-old student. (Read about an American university's battle over porn.)

Dark? Yes. Disturbing? Absolutely. But Haneke wants his films to challenge his audiences, not merely entertain. "If cinema is exclusively there to produce some aestheticizing lie, that's sad," he says. "If film wants to be a serious art form, it has to take the audience seriously and not simply move them but also engage with them."

Haneke certainly achieves that in The White Ribbon, which some critics have called his most beautiful movie to date. Set in a German village just before World War I, the film is shot in black and white and depicts how a community falls apart following a series of inexplicable events: a doctor injured when his horse stumbles over a trip wire, a woman killed in a sawmill accident, a child who suffers a horrific beating. As the mystery builds, Haneke examines how the villagers, in the face of their despair, grasp at any straw offered to them — in this case, religious doctrine. Despite moments of unfathomable cruelty, The White Ribbon is a warmer, happier film than Haneke's earlier efforts; the director's black humor is sprinkled throughout rather than painted on thick. There's even a sweet love story between the village schoolteacher and a trusting young nanny. (Read: "Haneke's The White Ribbon Wins Cannes Palme d'Or.")

Does this mean Haneke is becoming a tiny bit softer in his old age? He doesn't see it that way — in fact, he rejects the notion that his films reflect his personality at all. "People expect me to be dark and gloomy, then write that I'm a jolly chap, and after all, that is what I am," he says, a wry smile sneaking out from beneath his beard. "I think it's a case of an absolute romantic naivety that there should be a parallel between the work and the artist." (Read a brief history of the Palme d'Or.)

And he promises his next project won't deviate much from his trademark nihilism. He starts shooting next summer what he describes through stifled laughs as "a film about the decomposition and the humiliation of the human body in old age." Sounds like vintage Haneke — no soppy happy ending in sight.

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