Alternative Olivier Awards 2009! - a preview

I had the incomparable fortune to sit on the Olivier Awards panel in 2008, which made the whole year of theatre-going experience all the more special. Because they wouldn't take on the same people as lay panellists (which was what I was) in consecutive years, 2009 was a judging-duty-free year in the theatre. However, as I was astounded to have the total number of productions we'll have been to see by the year-end counted by my dutiful partner (sixty-one - including all plays and musicals; eighty-one if you include opera and dance), I thought that perhaps I was adequately qualified to put together an awards list after all. Alas this one will have to depend entirely on my personal taste (eclectic enough, I believe) and judgement (wise enough, I hope). Here we go:-

Best new play

When the Rain Stops Falling, Andrew Bovell
We've had a good year of Bovell plays in London: Toby Frow's new production of Speaking in Tongues shed new light on this earlier work, albeit with an uneven cast; and the European premiere of this stunning new piece, a characteristically multi-layered entangled plot spanning four generations and across two far-apart continents, was a resounding confirmation. Of how a dramatist at the height of his power can judge the narrative and psychological tensions with rare precision, distilling the word 'thriller' with a new, deeper meaning. Also, of the scale of accomplishment by Michael Attenborough in his Artistic Director role at Almeida, one of the independent powerhouses of London theatre. The ensemble cast boast no mega stars yet were uniformly outstanding. The night I was there, Keira Knightley and Rupert Friend were sitting a few rows behind us – now that we know they're both appearing in the West End, it would seem that they were wisely learning from the real pros. It was also one of the very few occasions this year that I was moved to uncontrollable sobs, at any arts event.

Honourable mention: Enron, Lucy Prebble (Royal Court Downstairs); Cock, Mike Bartlett (Royal Court Upstairs)
So much has been said about Enron, all I'd like to add is GO to see it in the West End, if you missed the Royal Court run. It will probably fit the bigger stage a bit better too. I was so pleased we booked for Cock very early on, as it became one of the highlights of the entire year, and because the bare, cock-pit set design (maximum seating: about 60) befit the text so perfectly, it'd be hard to imagine it being transferred to any West-End venue (or anywhere else, for that matter). Here's my 150-word review of it for the Olivier Award panel application:

Mike Barlett's provocatively titled, ninety-minute-long 'Cock', is a compelling piece of work. The series of tableaux portray an emotionally (and sexually – but that's the lesser concern here) confused young urbanite (John, the only named character) oscillating between his long-term male lover (M) and a loving, quietly tenacious female encounter (W), driving everyone involved – including the spectators – into sheer agony with his indecision along the way. If this equivocation sounds like the behaviour of a modern, metrosexual Hamlet, the denouement, a scene of 'the ultimate bitch fight' (as M puts it bitterly) with the threesome plus M's father around dinner table, evokes Ayckbourn at his best. Yet Bartlett shows great promise as an acute observer of contemporary conundrums of the heart, and demonstrates a distinctive style with his spit-fire dialogue in all the two-hander scenes, often delivering piercing poignancy and a great joke in one stroke. Ben Wishaw, as John, leads the superlative cast.


Best musical production
A Little Night Music, Menier Chocolate Factory
It was a shame that the subsequent WE transfer of this superbly elegant revival by Trevor Nunn wasn't much of a hit. Without a superstar billing it really struggled in competing with the likes of Jude Law in Hamlet and Helen Mirren in Phedre, both big summer audience draws. I didn't see it again (at Garrick), nor was I surprised to read about the mostly lukewarm reviews of Catherine Zeta-Jones's return to stage as Desiree in the Broadway transfer a few days ago. The original cast, on the living-room-sized MCF stage, conveyed much more emotional nuance than is usually expected from a musical, even one by Sondheim. The singing was exemplary, the simple design imbued with charm.


Best director
James MacDonald, for Judgement Day (Almeida) and Cock (Royal Court Upstairs)
We've had an exceptional year of London theatre, and yet these two stood out as the most perfect productions of the year for me. The fact that they came from the same director speaks volumes, and yet they couldn't have been more different in idiom and execution. The Horvath revival featured a hugely imaginative and effective use of the Almeida space with its design, which befits the 1930s play about moral responsibilities in its historic details, while also distilling it with a compelling, poetic modernity. Cock, on the other hand, would probably seem on paper like a real headache for many a less able director, with its writer specifying the lack of any set or props. Yet MacDonald achieves that most important task missed (or dismissed, in some cases?) by many directors – he makes us care about the characters, through their primal human behaviours and reactions. The rest is built by our imagination, easily.

Honourable mention: Rupert Goold, for Time and the Conways (Lyttleton, National) and Enron (Royal Court Downstairs)

Enron was the big theatrical event of the year in publicity terms (deservingly so, I hasten to add), but Goold's JB Priestley revival was a revelation of how powerful this 'time play'can still be. With its narrative structure, daringly ahead of its time, and the perpetually familiar setting of a dysfunctional family, the work also features themes of class, mortality, the impact of war, the power of money and the futility of kindness. Phew, quite a heavy-going recipe, you say. Yet above all, what Goold gives us is a poignantly human story, and to me the opinion-splitting multi-media choreography sequences lift the text to a powerfully charged emotional height.

Best actor
Kevin Spacey, Inherit the Wind (Old Vic)
Most pundits have hailed Mark Rylance's turn in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem as the performance of the year. I beg to differ. Spacey's artistic direction at the Old Vic finally got onto the right track last year, and seems, for the moment, to be going from strength to strength. He's a Big Performer on stage in the same sense as Rylance – powerful deliveries of lines, big physical gestures, sweeping emotions running the whole human gamut. If some of the dramatic movements appear to manoeuvre our emotions, they're there for a reason. Spacey's compelling Darwinian lawyer edges out for me over Rylance's West-country misanthrope, perhaps because so often do powerful plays impress with cool intellectuality stirred and shaken with cynicism, that when a good old fashioned debate (courtroom scene, no less!) fills you with warmth and hopefulness for mankind, it stays in the memory just a little bit longer.

Honourable mention: Ben Whishaw, Cock (Royal Court Upstairs)
I've added it to my Santa's wish list for this year that we see more of Whishaw on London stage before his schedule becomes inevitably monopolised by Hollywood blockbusters and the occasional arthouse films (New Yorkers who're reading this: get a ticket to his turn in 'The Pride' before it sells out NOW – another new play courtesy of Royal Court, this was the winner of the 2008 Olivier Award for an Affiliate Theatre that my fellow panellists and I voted for). It's not everyday that you have a truly dashing leading man who effortlessly exudes indelible charisma as well as piercing intelligence, and when the performer in question is not yet thirty, you know there's a wonderful career ahead waiting to unfold spectacularly.

Best actress
Rachel Weisz, A Streetcar Named Desire (Donmar Warehouse)
I wrote in my pre-review of Streetcar, back in July, that Weisz was excellent in this role but was far too beautiful and youthful for what we expect Blanche Dubois to be. This was echoed by a number of broadsheet critics, and Weisz herself pointed out – rightly – that Williams's text had specified Blanche as being a woman of thirty, a full eight years short of her own actual age. This, if nothing else, is illuminating on how Western society’s perception of youth has changed in the last century. And when I look back on the leading ladies of the year, Weisz's performance still stands out for the integrity and conviction with which she inhabited this well-known character.

Honourable mention: Juliet Stevenson, Duet for One (Almeida)
A superbly understated study of the helplessness of a superb mind, gradually and irreversibly being deprived of the body attached to it. We're accustomed to having such eternally fighting characters on stage now as well as surrounding us in real life. But once in a while an exceptional thespian shows us that the familiar story can be seen through different angles, with a kind of immobile viscerality we hitherto didn't know existed, and that's the case in point here.

Best performance in a supporting role
Bertie Carvel, Rope (Almeida)
Carvel impressed me in the aforementioned Royal Court production of The Pride last year (and as leading man in the new musical 'Parade' before that!), so I'd been looking forward to his latest role, in this Hitchcock adaptation. So much so that I nearly missed his entrance, because the handsome young man I remembered was unrecognisable as the cynical war veteran, so convincingly does he embody the role completely. Now that he's proved himself to be a real chameleon, I think he could become one of the great character actors of his generation. Surely being blessed with good looks doesn't hurt.

Honourable mention: Katherine Parkinson, Cock (Royal Court Upstairs; Rebecca Hall, Winter's Tale and The Cherry Orchard (Old Vic)
Parkinson, along with Ben Whishaw, talks us through a highly charged and deeply confused sex scene (her partner here being a gay man discovering the female species for the first time, literally) with no more physical movement than slowly circling the tiny stage in centrifugal steps. And it's one of the most sensual moments I've ever experienced on any stage. Her diffident, gentle yet steely character is no less complex than others in the play, but is the one who wins our heart. She can do the understated comical too, which is a rare gift.
Hall was memorable in both plays that constituted the inaugural Bridge Project in the summer. It takes a real actress to tackle both Chekov and Shakespeare – her characters effectively divided by twenty years in age – concurrently, with aplomb. As with Wishaw, I sincerely hope her commitment to the stage shall remain for a while, and I can see her maturing into Arkadinda one day already, via Nora and many more Shakespearean heroines along the way.


Best new choreography
Russell Maliphant, AfterLight
One quarter of an evening of world premieres created to the brief 'In the Spirit of Diaghilev', Maliphant's short, mesmerising male solo is deceptively simple by description: a theme and variations of the dancer (Daniel Proietto, ethereally beautiful) spiralling in semi-light. It succeeds, in breathtaking fashion, in what the choreographer set out to do: to capture the essence of Nijinsky the dancer.

Hail, the Civilised Commute

Well I'd never envisaged these two words appearing in the same sentence - until our blisfully stress-free journey home tonight, after the two-hour-long first half of Mother Courage. (I may be a theatre fanatic but I never waver in deciding to walk out of things, which actually happens a few times a year.) Walking across Hungerford Bridge in anticipation of our usual District/Circle line - DLR journey home, shivering a bit in the newly plummeted temperature, we catch sight of a Thames Clipper drawing near Embankment Pier. I have used the service a couple of times before but always for touristy purposes - specifically, taking visiting friends on a boatride from the Savoy Pier (an easy walk from work) to Canary Wharf, followed by dinner at home. M reminds me that Oyster cards are now valid for discounted journeys on the boat. An unspoken collective decision is made in half a second, as we accelerate our steps descending the bridge. The smiling, laid-back pier staff confirm that the boat is indeed about to depart for the East, and within seconds we are seated in the warm, cavernous cabin, watching the pier recede.

There's really nothing more civilised than taking a boat trip down the Thames at ten o'clock on a winter evening. The early Christmas lights already seem a bit more plentiful on the Southbank than usual, offsetting the slightly more distant, yet no less imposing sight of the Parliament nicely. The water is calm, and the brief stops at each pier along the way - only if there's anyone alighting or waiting to board - so smooth, that the harsh chill and wind that we enountered a few minutes ago already seem like a strange urban myth. The National that we just stepped out of, Oxo Tower, Design Museum, HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge - all the familiar landmarks that we choose to sweep under the 'sights for tourists' category on overground journeys anytime of the day, now seem to disclose themselves in a tantalising new dimension. I'm sure the gently irregular, undulating rhythm in which we're travelling has something to do with it. All around us, the dozen or so fellow passengers are either solo commuters (some people caught this boat a lot earlier than we did - metaphorically of course) buried in their books or Blackberries (for you can actually do all the virtual business here if you want, unlike on the Tube), or couples exchanging muted conversations. This naturally serene, almost poetic setting discourages high volume of any sort by default.

Before we know it, the glowing Canary Wharf towers are upon us. We disembark the boat with a cheery wave to the boat staff (even the people working on the river are so much nicer than their underground colleagues), commencing the short walk home. At just over a pound more than the regular Tube journey would have cost, this was worth every penny. We resolve to ascertain the timetable of the Thame Clipper service in the post-theatre hours, and I suspect we'll soon become regulars on the boat. Post-culture journey home had never felt so perfectly civilised.

10 Unforgettable Travel Moments (so far) - Part I

As you'll see, some of these are longer journeys rather than moments per se, but let's not get too academic here with the definition. All of the experiences made the list for a variety of wildly different reasons...

#10: The Moment of Disbelief
national highway, Eastern Syria (near Iraqi border)
April 2009
We've been exploring nearly half of the country by this point, both the more touristy route between Damascus and Palmyra, and the areas beyond, which distinctly less so. We've got used to the reckless locals suddenly appearing out of nowhere in the rear mirror, in their battered vehicles, overtaking us in a flash, and disappearing in the distance in similar Formula-One fashion. The Roman blood apparently still runs deep in many Syrian veins, a whole Millenium later, when it comes to driving. However, this relatively wound-less Kia (most new-ish cars gracing the roads in this country are Korean makers, including our rental car) has just done something very odd indeed: having overtaken us with no hesitation at all and already in a lead of about 500 meters, it suddenly slows down in the neighbouring lane - or something that's supposed to be such - as if waiting for us to reciprocate the triumphant gesture. We keep to our speed and catch up with it in a few seconds, and realise that we've become the object of this bizarre scrutiny-in-motion: the three local youths in the Kia have evidently never before seen two Asian tourists venturing into this part of the country in their own vehicle, and want to make sure that we're not some weird mirage that they dreamed up at high speed. Once they've ascertained that we really resemble normal human beings, albeit scoring even higher on the scale of recklessness perhaps, they step down on the gas once again and disappear into the horizon. You'll never believe how fast a ten-year-old Kia can possibly go until you've taken a trip along the Eupherates.

#9: The Moment of Natural Power
Prof Leider's house, near Miami, Florida
January 2006
Prof Leider was one of my PhD colleagues at Princeton, and the last time we saw each other was in early 2002. We're therefore doubly thrilled to be invited to this roast-pig party on New Year's Day at his new family abode, just under an hour's drive from Miami. The neighbourhood is your typical suburban Florida (or so as I perceive it): sprawling one-storey family homes, thus hurricane-proof, each with surrounding lawns and/or woodlands roughly the size of two or three postcodes in London. As we pull up the Leiders' driveway, the first sight that greets us is, um, a free-standing, seemingly fully-functioning, fully-loaded Pepsi machine. Our dear friend comes out the front door. 'Welcome you guys, so great to see you!' 'Yes wonderful to see you too but, listen, what on earth is this doing in your front lawn?!?!'
He grins and recounts the story for the five hundredth time. They had the annual hurricane season a couple of months ago, which in this part of the world is taken for granted as just a slightly more inconvenient part of your life. One of the more severe ones lasted about two days this time, and after it ended the Man of the House pulled up all the customary window boards and went out to inspect the damages. The first thing he sees, lying right outside their doorstep, is the Pepsi machine. He puts it up against the wall, finds a power socket and plug it in - for this is what you do when you see a Pepsi machine, right? - and lo and behold, the whole thing pops back into life instantly, complete with backlights. They now have a fully-loaded, fully-functioning Pepsi machine to entertain the two little children with. Of course, being the conscentious and intelligent people they are, they manage to track down the provenance of the machine, which in fact belonged to a school two towns away, pre-hurricane. Professor rings the school up informing them of this latest chapter in the adventure of the machine, but it would seem to be the final chapter, as the cheerful lady at the other end of the line asks him to keep it, for their brand-new replacement has already arrived courtesy of the super-efficient hurricant insurance company. This is the brief but bizzare tale of how two visitors from London end up spending part of their New Year's Day celebration inserting pairs of quarter coins into the Pepsi machine proudly guarding Prof Leider's front door, and receiving the can in the slot below with a loud Thud!, in amazement.

#8: The Moment of Pain
Midnight in Business Hotel Room, Stockholm
October 2006
I'm in my favourite city for a three-day business trip to attend multiple concerts featuring music by one of our most important composers as well as numerous meetings, and have happily settled down at the central hotel that I'm already familiar with from previous stays. Three in the morning, I suddenly wake up with the semi-conscious awareness that something is wrong. It takes another two seconds to realise that what's wrong is that I'm in excruciating pain, and yet another two and a half to locate the precise source of this pain - in my lower gums, where I had a filling done two years previously by a young dentist who I thought looked a bit haphazard at the time, and whom I now just want to strangle with what little strength there is left in me. The rest of the night is sheer agony - it doens't just hurt when you try to chew something on that side, but all the time, when you talk, when you think, when you try to think, every waking and sleeping minute. I stick to the original meeting schedule for the next two days while managing the minimum intake of food and drink that keeps me alive. I go to the dentist's (not the same one!) the moment I get back to London and a root canal is scheduled for the next day. Two lessons learned:
- Don't ever take anything for granted when it comes to the dental department. Nothing's ever wrong until something goes horribly wrong.
- The threshold of physical pain endurance is as high or as low as you can let it be.

Old friend, New friend, Non-friend

I can't help thinking how Sex-and-The-City-like this blog title is, which would be appropriate, as I made a mental note to write about it after being greeted - for about the two hundredth time - shrilly, earnestly, a little too worryingly fervently -

'How're ya doing' today???!!!!'

Yes, I was in New York City a few weeks ago. And no, I had no personal or professional connection with the person who'd just flashed an ear-to-ear smile at me with the question, in fact I didn't know him/her whatsoever. I had, as you've probably guessed, just walked into a shop for a spot of aimless window-shopping, but my new-found oldest friend was determined not to let even the slightest impression of neglect take hold.

Many frequent travellers, myself included, would acknowledge the commendable enthusiasm of the service-industry employees in the US on the whole , compared with their European counterparts. They like to make you feel they really care, their actual knowledge or competence being an entirely different matter. The big smiles and fully-loaded attentiveness are supposed to be the norm. And even an awful cynic like me can be left impressed often. But after all these years - including two living in the US - the intimacy of the Big Greeting by a total stranger can still make me jump sometimes. Or just simply wonder: do they actually ever expect a truthful reply to the question (for that's what it is, however rhetotic)? What would happen if anyone actually looked into their eyes and replied with equal fervour: 'Well, I'm feeling really crappy. I had a horrible day at work and things aren't going so well at home either. And now a total stranger has just pretended that they genuinely care about how I feel. I mean, I've given you the honest answer and now what can you do for me?!'

Globalisation and technology have, hand in hand, changed our perspectives on relationship and intimacy in so many ways. But really there's no point in deluding ourselves. In the world of Facebook, you become 'friends' with people who you've met once or twice. Didn't it use to take a little more effort, serendipity, common interest - and, simply, time - for true friendship to take hold? Whatever happened to the category of 'acquaintances'? What's wrong with just being acquainted with someone? Well nothing, except that if A is an Acquaintance to B as opposed to a Friend like C is, there's something horrifyingly wrong with A, especially if all this Profile is viewed by three hundred other people on a daly basis.

I am indeed aware that the meaningless enquiry of our state of wellbeing is not specifically confined to the American retail sector. Doctors, helpline workers, telemarketers, total strangers in any other number of guises, all want to know just how you're feeling right this moment. And of course no answer other than the positive affirmative can possibly be comtemplated. This is the basic rule of manners of our social existence. But because we already live in a world of excessive spam - materialistic, virtual, emotional - it's quite refreshing, once in a while, to be greeted by something that's merely functional but really a lot more useful than an empty smile. The shop assistants also automatically pump out their chorus of a one-liner in Japan and China, and they tend to be:

'Please feel free to look around!'

A Superb Korean Trio

By design rather than coincidence, we've had a bit of a Blitz of Korean cinematic outings in the capital lately. First there were the strong selections at London Film Festival, then the Bong Joon Ho retrospective (at NFT) and the annual Korean Film Festival at Barbican ran almost concurrently. We managed to catch quite a few recent releases amidst it all, and these three really stood out.

Mother - Bong Joon Ho's latest, it's the best of both worlds of his two previous films: the who-dun-it Memories of Murder with a skilfully woven plot that would satisfy the most hard-core detective story nerds; and The Host, with the disguise of a monster disaster movie but really is about the complexity and frailty of human relations, especially those between family members. At the opening of the film, we see the mother of the title chopping up dry herbs on a machinery terrifying in its simplicity. We can already foresee the consequence of her action because she is wholly distracted by the movements of her son, cursed with mental disability (the source of which is itself revealed in a particularly chilling moment later in the film), across the street. Yet she's oblivious of it, because what happens and what will happen to the boy is all that matters to her. This single-minded determination accompanies her on her dark journey throughout the film to discover the truth behind the terrible murder that her son has been implicated in. Yet the revelation of every piece of new information, the peeling away of every layer of the onion skin, involves the inevitable, and sometimes fatal, baring of the soul. By the end we're just as much in need of an artifical injetion as the mother herself, to ease us from the pain brought on by the acceptance of our innate, helpless callousness. I can imagine scores of Hollywood directors looking at the script over and over again before giving up on a potential adaptation, because there's no way of making a new version of this one without preserving the poignant ending. The mother has already shown us how her own, and the son's, destinies are sealed with those semi-automatic fallings of the dry-herb gullotin. There can be no nother way.

Scandal Makers - written by the debut director Kang Hyeon-Cheol himself, this is a superb comedy that achieves the almost impossible - making a roomful of Western and Asian audiences roar with laughter for the same reasons. The protagonist of the film is the host of a hugely popular phone-in radio show, a sleek confirmed bachelor in his mid-thirties. The opening sequence is almost a parodied version of the famous 'daily morning ritual' scene from American Psycho, with the eligible single male in his designer bachelor's pad, going through the motions of muscle-building exercise, skincare journey in the power shower, outfit deliberation in the walk-in wardrobe, and nutrition-specific breakfast. His show has been doing particularly well of late, with millions tuning in to follow the gripping story, serialised by emails, of a young single mum in the quest of her own father, who lost his virginity at the age of fifteen to an older woman, and is not aware of the existenc of his offsprings at all. The host charmingly urges her to seek out her destiny, except little does he know this will lead to a knock on his own door at a most inopportune moment... The basics of the story may be far-fetched but are never contrived, and the human reactions by each characters, to the unlikely situations they find themselves in, are hilarious yet touching. Stereotypes and cliches pop up from time to time, but all in good will, and you never feel for a moment that the writer/director is deploying a gag just to create gratuitous laughter. The totally dedicated cast rise up to the challenge, and I defy even the most unflappable cinemagoer not to swoon each time the five-year-old Wang Seok-Hyun (playing the grandson) appears on screen. Highly recommended. Catch it before the inevitable Hollywod remake hits the screen (reportedly already in the works).

A Frozen Flower - you would be forgiven for thinking that it's nigh-on impossible for any other film-maker to try treading the water again with a tangled story of homosexual love involving royalties in the court of ancient Korea, after the sumptuous The King and The Clown from 2005. Well, the director Yu Ha pulls it off with admirable panache, complete with - gulp - even more stunning lead actors. One of the key differences in the plot device from the earlier film is in the female character. The Queen here, instead of being just a jealous, passive aggressor, is one third of the male-female love triangle. The King is also not a tempestuous, ignorant tyranny, but someone who's intelligent and righteous, whose priority in a life-threatening moment is to ensure the safety of his queen, even though he has not spared a sparkle of love for her, either emotionally or physically. Such graciousness is only maintained, alas, until the moment he realises that the Queen has supplanted him in the heart of his true love, the dashing Captain of the Royal Guards who has been groomed by the King since childhood. And who sowed the seeds of the discovery of heterosexual carnal thrill but the King himself, in a desperate attempt to produce a royal heir under the covers ('You're the only one I can trust', he says to the Captain, an ominous key of a sentence, to the Pandora's box for all concerned). All three lead actors imbue their characters with both striking nobility and touching vulnerability even in the most delicate situations, of which there are numerous, running the whole emotional gamut from the farcical to the heartrending. Against the epic backdrop of sovereign battles, royal assassinations and other age-old political games, the director presents us with the simple question of Where the Heart Lies. And even after all the blood is shed, the hearts broken, the skulls brandished (literally), the answer is still appropriately ambiguous. The court scenes at banquets, army inspections and assassinations serve up a visual feast while never losing the meticulous emotional details, which is something that films such as Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Yellow Flowers utterly failed to achieve in contrast.

Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon

The ancient Chinese adage goes: 'The beginnings of all human beings consist of nothing but kindness.' Well do they really? Haneke's latest masterpiece confronts us, head on, with both sides of the argument. All the adults in the film, including the narrator, the school teacher (an atypically uncomplicated Haneke character), merely provide background layers - albeit crucial ones - to the story. Whereas the group of children, aged four to fourteen, are the focal points of the stark blank-and-white (literally) canvas.

Haneke is well known for pushing his actors beyond the usual limits of performative capacies, yet what superman techniques he deployed here to extract such chillingly heartfelt (for one's heart is over-chilled throughout most of the scenes) performances from these little ones, only the devil knows. For the devil hides himself in every unseen corner, and eventually manages to creep into some of the veins of the underaged beings. Or was he there all along? Every adult playing a noble (in social terms at least) role in life has an appallingly dark side here, and the way they attempt to preserve the 'purity' of their offsprings is via emotional humiliation, physical abuse, religious shock tactics, or all of the above. The oppressed include not just these children, but when their adult company make an attempt at retaliation, the outcome is clumsy and futile, only to bring more severe punishment onto themselves. The children, in contrast, are much more instinctive and ruthless with their acts of evil, and what initial fear there might be it quickly subsides - once the fascination with death is brushed aside, there is nothing left to fear. Respectable adults busy themselves with adultery, incest, religious hypocrisy, deceipt, class resentment, familial despotism (a rather short list for a Haneke film, really). How pathetically banal. The invisible ones - for they are purposefully overlooked, until our ardent school teacher decides to really look around - carry out the horrific acts as if saying, Look what you can really do if you go straight to the core. And we're all alike. We were all born like this, not consisting of an ounce of kindness. The so-called child-like innocence was always a facade after all. We're just waiting to become adults so that we will have proper excuses to web schemes and layers for our brutalities, and then we can instill all that into our own children too, all in good time.

The fact that these children would grow up to be the Nazi generation has been pointed out by every film critic worthy of his job, but to me it's almost an afterthought. The abrupt ending to the village horrors, as everyone, adult and child alike, is distracted by the onset of WWI, could almost be replaced by the onslaught of any arbitrary war, without the specific historic reference. The really vital context of the story is not that particular annus horibilis of human history, but the human nature itself. For our children's innocence had been tainted not just by these parents, but by generations of forbears already. When did it all start, and where will it end? In an even more atypical Hakane scene, l'auteur depicts an almost completely care-free, happy moment between prim, shy, ingenuous young lovers. Not a message of hope amidst despair exactly, but a provocatively tender masterstroke nevertheless.

What I Believe In

Because we're destined to be ordinary people
We owe it to ourselves
to live extra-ordinary lives