Rent Benny's Video (1992)

A difficult film to love - Benny's Video review by RJ

I'm going to start this review with a warning, for those who are affected by such things, that this film begins with footage showing the unsimulated slaughter of a pig (to make matters worse, this footage is then immediately rewound and shown again). I mention this because it is an emotive topic and I know some people would not be able to continue watching. I'm not sure exactly where I stand on this issue - I'm a vegetarian on the grounds of animal cruelty so this was hard for me to watch, but I did carry on watching. Although, as I said, I am vegetarian, I don't make it a habit to adopt strict ethical/moral stances on many issues because the water is normally murkier than one might think at first glance, and trying to be black-and-white about complex issues is problematic. Apparently in a later Haneke film, The Time of the Wolf, there is unsimulated slaughter of some horses - and as I've already bought the Haneke box set, I will have to confront this issue again when I get to that film.

For now, I'll try to get back to reviewing this film. I loved Haneke's first film (The Seventh Continent - my gushing review is available for your pleasure on this website) and as I'm working (slowly) through his films in chronological order, I can't help but review Benny's Video in comparison to the earlier film. Long story short, I found Benny's Video slightly less engaging and interesting on just about every level. The Seventh Continent seemed to me to have absolute clarity of both purpose and execution, whereas in Benny's Video the themes, ideas and storytelling techniques seem a bit jumbled. Thematically, like The Seventh Continent, it is concerned with a perceived moral and spiritual void at the heart of bourgeois, middle-class life, with the main addition being a contemplation of how both the consumption and the creation of video imagery affect this situation. I don't think it is straightforwardly didactic in the sense of 'blaming' mass media consumption for the act of murder that Benny commits - there are too many intentional ambiguities in the film for it to be taken that way.

I enjoyed the subtle suggestion that Benny's parents are secretly quite excited by the prospect of having a murder victim to dispose of, and the trip that Benny and his mother take to Egypt, filmed mostly on Benny's video camera, is hauntingly strange. But the ending is predictable (even if Benny's motives remain debatable) and overall I just didn't engage with it especially deeply. It's worth remembering that this film is now nearly 30 years old, and the mass consumption and creation of imagery has reached levels way beyond what is depicted in it, so maybe it has suffered a little bit from becoming dated in that aspect.