Lemminge – Teil 1: Arkadien

Growing up in Vienna Neustadt in the late 1950s is not so easy. Even the promises of pop culture don't help. The semi-autobiographical generational drama Lemminge is Haneke's debut as a director and author in one; it exposes a world view that would permeate his work from then on and deals with it in a form that he would take up again in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and later in Code: inconnu. Haneke interweaves the paths or “fates” of several characters, which he gradually brings together. Here it is Eva, Christian, Fritz and the upper middle-class siblings Sigrid and Sigurd. Five high school students trapped in the values of their parents' generation: one of their fathers curses them as “lemmings” and “voles” and attests to their “pointless goal of soon dying like them”. The way there is sometimes more comical than Haneke's later films would suggest. In advertising, one would say: fun for the whole family! (K.M.)