Greek mythology has found an ideal adaptation in Alkeste – Die Bedeutung, Protektion zu haben, for a story of love and death set in a rugged – but extremely poetic – Vienna of the 1970s. And Euripides’ Alcestis is here staged in a never banal or predictable way, with a directorial approach that at times recalls the French Nouvelle Vague.
There really is a lot to be enjoyed in dealing with all the numerous ideas that the life of this brilliant artist has to offer us. All depends on knowing how to handle them well, in order to make a never predictable or didactic work that is able to portray one of Austria’s most important artistic personalities as passionately and faithfully as possible. And Dieter Berner has perfectly succeeded in this never easy and by no means banal task with his Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden.
In The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke’s first feature film, what we observe is the progressive and sudden disintegration of the contemporary bourgeois family, observed and approached in an almost Schnitzlerian style, complete with omnipresent violence that is never really represented before our eyes. A constant theme, this, in Haneke’s rich filmography.