Benny's Video

Unfortunately, I think I've got enough foreign films on my DVR that I'm not going to get through all of them before they expire. One that was about to expire that I wanted to watch more than some of the French films that I recorded more because French cinema has the reputation of being "important" is a more recent film from Austria: Benny's Video. TCM ran it quite as part of a double bill of movies by director Michael Haneke; I already did a post on The Seventh Continent at the end of October.

Benny (Arno Frisch) is a 14-year-old living in Vienna who seems to have a thing for video, both watching movies on video as well as videography. His parents have encouraged this hobby by moving the TV into his bedrood, as well as getting him multiple video cameras, although the question of how they can afford that isn't quite answered. They're part of some sort of farm scheme where they get a fraction of the proceeds of a farm out in the country, and that gave Benny the chance to record a disturbing video: the farmers slaughter a pig using the same sort of stun gun that Anton Chigurh uses in No Country for Old Men.

Benny's parents don't know about this video, as they're absent a lot spending weekends at that farm, which I suppose is part of why they indulge Benny. This also gives Benny's adult sister Evi a chance to use the apartment to run her pyramid schemes, with Benny recording that as well. Benny also likes to hang out with his friends in between going to the video rental place to pick up the latest set of videos that he's going to be renting. It's there that he sees The Girl, a student his age but not at his school. She lives out in the suburbs and commutes to presumably a specialized school, and hangs outside the video shop watching the movies they put up on the screens that face the street. Benny, seeing her a lot, invites her over to his place since his parents are once again away for the weekend.

There, he shows her how he's got a surveillance camera watching the street, and can switch between that and a camera in his room facing the other direction. He also shows her the pig video, before revealing that he stole the stun gun from the farm. He even dares her to shoot him in the abdomen. She doesn't, for obvious reasons, but then he turns the gun around and shoots her! This hurts her enough to stun her and leave her bloody and screaming. Benny, not knowing how to deal with the screaming, shoots in the head enough times until she shuts up, which she does because she's really quite dead.

This presents all sorts of problems. How do you dispose of the dead body and all the other evidence that goes with it? They're in an apartment, so it's not as if Benny has a place to bury the body. And if he tries to leaving the building with a body-sized package, people are going to notice. Hell, Thelma Ritter noticed when Raymond Burr used his salesman's case to take out parts of his wife's body in Rear Window.

So some time after his parents return, Benny nonchalantly shows them the video. Benny's all of 14, so this being a European country perhaps he'd be tried as a juvenile. But Dad thinks that would wind up with Benny being put in some sort of psychiatric institution, and what would that do for the family's reputation, which seems more important to Dad than the dead body. So Dad comes up with a plan that can't possibly work: make up a grandma who retired to Egypt and died there so that Mom and Benny can leave Austria for a week, during which time Dad will dispose of the body. The plan can't possibly work, can it?

Benny's Video is a movie that, like The Seventh Continent, is fairly disturbing and a bit hard to review. One gets the impression that perhaps Michael Haneke was trying to make a commentary on absentee parenting or the effect of media violence on the young. But he sets himself a problem that he doesn't quite know how to solve. The movie is interesting if a tough watch up until the point that mother and son head off to Egypt, at which point it loses steam and also feels like it requires an even bigger suspension of belief than the first half. But I think that people who don't have a problem seeing this sort of violence depicted on screen will find something in Benny's Video worth watching.