Cold heaven

Variations on the arbitrariness of events: Jessica Hausner’s cinema

“Cold heaven” – a wonderful yet creepy, film by Nicolas Roeg which is far too rarely shown tells the story of a young man who is fatally and relatively brutally wounded, yet returns to his wife as if nothing has happened. She, for her part, doesn’t really want to be grateful or show any joy about this “miracle”, this “mercy”. Unease prevails around a situation which in times of great sadness may have been something people wished for but which at the same time appears to be crazy, scary and unfair. As in all great stories of metaphysics, transcendence, belief and religion (see for example George Bernanos’s “Sous le soleil de Satan”), the miracle, or whatever you think it is, becomes a cause for doubt about the order or lack of order of things, for truly horrendous fear of God. It’s as if the only one who has sinned is the person who has experienced an act of mercy, however this has occurred, which for its part may be shown to be nothing more than a delusion, sickness or self-deception. Perception vs. confusion. In short, those are the best ingredients for the machine of deception that is the cinema.

It is perhaps pretentious to start an appraisal of Jessica Hausner’s previous work with such a distant reference. Maybe, to understand the origins of the balance in her films between distance and a fixed view on the immediate, specific details, it would be better to look at the paintings done by her father, Rudolf Hausner, and her half sister Xenia Hausner. But when her feature film “Lourdes” first appeared in cinemas, the first feeling the viewers had was that this was finally one of those “rich” texts (which are all too rare in modern cinema), a motion picture story which really risks something in an attempt to trace societal mechanisms and human impulses and yet at the same time to maintain their inherent puzzle.

Anybody who, on the basis of the trailer, expected fashionable, smug amusement at Catholic rituals would be surprised by the seriousness with which Hausner approaches the pilgrimage site, the hope of the pilgrims, who in many cases are seriously ill, and also the logistics of package tourism through which to a certain degree exceptional promises of healing and salvation become the norm. “Lourdes” is a film which, without the comfortable polemic, looks at questions about religion many people have and yet in an age of fundamentalists has become a taboo subject. A fairy tale, if you will, with a documentary approach. A fantasy drama, yet down to earth.

“Lourdes” too (and how could it be any different given the place shrouded in legend which gives the film its name) is about a “miracle” and/or about deception. At one point, a young woman (Sylvie Testud) gets up out of her wheelchair only to sink back exhausted into her chair at the end of the film (not “cured” after all?). What Jessica Hausner exposes in terms of the interplay of relationships linked to this standing up and sinking back down can be described extensively on various different levels. “Lourdes” as a portrait of an industry of miracles and hope (which is viewed with suspicion and scepticism even within Catholic circles); as a documentation of pragmatic day-to-day communication between those providing a service and sick people, which is suddenly called into question again as a result of a significant event; or as a laconic representation of lower middle class competition and jealousy: why has that person been healed on their first visit to Lourdes and not the long-serving pilgrims? One distinctive quote is “if it doesn’t last, it wasn’t a miracle. Then HE can’t do anything about it.”

What Jessica Hausner thought in an interview I was able to do with her: “The drama ‘Lourdes’ is about hoping that everything will turn out alright. You expect love for yourself, you have a longing, you hope that someone somewhere has a net spread out and you’re safe. In contrast to this, though, you recognise every day that the world isn’t like that; that the universe is dark and cold and that at the end of the day you’re going to die. That what you do may be good, but it won’t lead to you having a fulfilled, happy life. Other factors come into play, whether you call these ‘coincidence’, ‘luck’ or ‘God’, which are stronger and have an impact, and things take an unsuspected, undesired or unexpected turn. This counterpart is powerful and has a lot to do with the arbitrariness of events.”

The arbitrariness of events: Reduce the small number of works by this artist (Jessica Hausner was born in 1972 and has since produced four feature films) to one major theme should almost not be allowed. However, there is an observation that in all of her films/portraits of women – from “Lovely Rita” (2000) through “Hotel” (2004) and “Lourdes” (2009) to “Amour Fou” (2014), Hausner always pushes the following set-up: here is a young woman, and you don’t know whether her voicelessness is an obstacle, or resistance, or simply diffuse indifference to the social structures around her; since this is a world characterised by strict rituals, within which this woman seems almost not to fit, up until the point (cathartic, desperate, whatever) at which the circumstances turn on themselves in an almost violent manner. What does Hausner say about Henriette Vogel in “Amour Fou”: “I am particularly interested in female figures who appear to be good at the start and then as the story develops you notice that they are contradicting everything you thought about them in a relatively stubborn, obstinate manner. At the start, a woman like that appears to be soft and nice, and then you figure out that she’s squeezing her hands into fists in her pockets. Henriette Vogel was probably one of these types of women.”

Jessica Hausner’s heroines don’t act rebelliously. They don’t revolt in that sense. The circumstances simply bounce off them (very hard). They often seem to be “not quite from this world”, as unabashedly indifferent foreign bodies around whom the environment, which previously worked well and was opaque, is destroyed, so its arbitrariness and instability becomes evident. In “Lovely Rita”, the heroine is a girl who can’t quite seem to get on with the fitted kitchen and nuclear family life she was born into until things come to an almost natural and yet simultaneously inadequate violent end. In “Hotel”, it is an employee who for all of her lack of speech and coldness is inherently very natural, so the forest and the nature around the hotel take her back as if of their own accord. (An association: “Oh Wilderness, oh Protection from it” – there are close links to Elfriede Jelinek). And then finally in “Lourdes”: this paralysed woman who despite her helplessness, you don’t know whether it isn’t also a way to test relationships or to keep people at a distance in which their own misery or nobleness can be recognised.

This attitude of an essential and in some cases also deliberate alienation is also reflected in Jessica Hausner’s method of working and staging. “Essentially, I try to bring a distance to the story I’m telling. If I think about the story, a filming location, I try to take ten steps back and look at everything from the outside. Strange settings help me to achieve that. Locations such as Lourdes, or the French language – that helped me to view the story I’m telling in a cooler light.” At the same time, and this is a very much tried and tested paradox used by major narrators, this something-in-the-distance displacement works as a magnifying glass. In “Lourdes”, this goes as far as Sylvie Testud looking very similar to her director. It almost seems as if Hausner is putting herself in the wheelchair and in a motionlessness from which the self-explanatory has to be prised from the circumstances once again. From a cinematic perspective, this results in suspense and an astonishment which is in every respect radical and not naive.

You shouldn’t confuse the coolness of Jessica Hausner’s films with a lack of empathy. If, like her, you look carefully, even if you do so with the view of an insect researcher staring through a microscope or with the gesticulation of a melodramatic director who seems to have an interest in costumes and set design, you will often put the most significant emotions on the operating table. For “Amour Fou”, Jessica Hausner typically spent a good deal of time looking into Heinrich von Kleist, who in his text on the “Puppet Theatre” writes: “If I tell you that these wretches dance, I’m worried you won’t believe me. – What do I mean, dancing? The circle of their movement is limited, but those who are available to you have a peacefulness, lightness and grace which will astonish every thinking soul.”

The astonishment we’re talking about here: in Jessica Hausner’s films, this is expressed with a laconically raised eyebrow. Or more correctly, this astonishment doesn’t want to impact the world and it doesn’t presume to improve it in a pointed or “critical” manner. It simply wants to leave it there as it is, playing and dancing. And this is from the perspective of women who are required to adapt as far as possible and to change: this also provides the tension and suspense which is perpetually present in these films. This cinema, with its grounded and precise approach to real relationships, is not measured by contemporary docudrama formats, it goes back to an old form of communication between people and between genders. Kleist’s “Marquise of O.”, Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” would be conceivable material for this director and author, who has not previously had to adapt any literature to reinvent the world in films without bias or a message.

Jessica Hausner: “I try to portray the characters who appear in my films along with their societal role. It’s always interesting to see “who I am supposed to be” and “who I am as a result of that”. Whether or not I do what is expected of me in one way defines who I am. Whether I play this role in society or am this role is expressed by my interactions. There are guidelines, and to me the costumes and uniforms are a visual expression of this.”

Jessica Hausner gives us many visual aids to show what that ultimately means for women.

Claus Philipp, born in Wels in 1966, was a film critic for many years and was later head of the culture section for the Austrian daily newspaper “Der Standard”. Since 2008, he has been CEO of Stadtkino Filmverleih, which is now bringing “Amour Fou” to Austrian cinemas.