Arthouse-Thriller & the absurdity of 'Hanna'

Movies Now is a fantastic film appreciation course run through the University of Sydney by eminent Australian Film Critic Andrew Urban of Urban Cinefile. The concept is superbly simple - each week participants watch a new movie that hasn’t yet been released. They watch it cold, with no introduction and no pre-idea of what they are about to see. And then afterwards Andrew, along with an invited guest, discuss the film with the audience. Sometimes the movies are great, sometimes they are less so, but in either case watching fresh new movies and talking about them is my idea of heaven. And this week I got to be Andrew’s invited guest.

The movie was Hanna (starring Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana) and it was touted as an 

‘Arthouse Thriller’ selected to open the Sydney Film Festival this year.

But what does that mean, ‘Arthouse Thriller’…?

Thriller is clearly a genre - a long standing and highly successful one. Indeed many outstanding and great works of modern cinema are firmly and clearly from this genre; I think of films like The Conversation, North by Northwest, The Third Man, Syriana and the Bourne trilogy.

But what does ‘Arthouse mean? can it viably be called a genre? Or is it simply the bucket stamped with a sticker that reads ‘not Hollywood’. Or simpler still, ‘miscellaneous’?

From a writer or filmmakers perspective understanding their film as a ‘Thriller’ is a very useful tool allowing the movie to stand on the shoulders of the giants that have gone before, to build upon a body of knowledge that audiences have already accumulated. Likewise from an audience perspective the label of Thriller sets up clear feeling-state expectations on the part of the viewer - irrespective of plot they go into the film expecting to be ‘thrilled’.

But ‘Arthouse’…? For the writer or filmmaker the pseudo-genre label of Arthouse is entirely unhelpful, short of setting up a vague plan to be ‘different’, ‘quirky’ or ‘not Hollywood’. Likewise for audiences the term Arthouse does nothing but imply that the film might be a bit unusual, ambiguous or esoteric.

In either case ‘Arthouse’ tells us very little and is decidedly unhelpful. 

So what the hell is an ‘Arthouse-Thriller’….? 

Does it mean Thriller fused with something else? 

Is it a Thriller-with-a-difference? 

Is it a moniker to denote and advertise an ‘unusual’ element in an otherwise well established genre? 

Or is it just a bullshit weasel word used as a lacquer varnish to explain away swiss-cheese plotting and overdone ham-fisted directing; “say its ‘Arthouse’ and the audience wont care about the lack of logic, coherence, character or substance…”

In the case of Hanna it surely has to be the latter. 

The film certainly employs the mechanics of the Thriller genre - rogue agent spies, vindictive government agencies, secret DNA manipulated super-solider programs; Hanna pilfers liberally from every techno-premised spy-thriller of the past two decades. And it then converges this formulaic pattern with a family coming-of-age drama that borders on screw-ball comedy - The Bourne Identity meets Little Miss Sunshine. 

This is not to suggest that it couldn’t or cant work. Indeed there are precedents. I think immediately of the Luc Bresson film Leon: the Professional. Here we have a film that could arguably (and more legitimately) lay claim to a mantle of Arthouse-Thriller. In many ways Leon:The Professional is the film that Hanna wishes it could be but falls very far short of. In Leon the thrills come in the form of a Hitman and his encounter with a corrupt cop. The Artthouse part is the moral complexity and sophistication of the film in dealing (with subtlety and nuance) a kind of love affair between a Hitman and a 12 year old girl - very often through humour bordering on slapstick. 

When seen in the context of a film like Leon, the problems of Hanna are not that it bisociates and juxtaposes different genres together in a hybrid pastiche - Leone achieves this with aplomb without ever letting the coming-of-age love story get in the way of the thrills. Rather the problems of Hanna are not in its Arthouse-ness or its Thriller packaging - they are in its utter lack of logic and plausibility.

Now, Logic and Plausibility are of course very flexible terms…. In Lord of the Rings elves, dwarves and ghosts are entirely logical and plausible. Story logic is Internal logic, derived from the rules of the storyworld. Your audience will ‘believe’ anything so long as they see that the behaviours of events and characters adhere to the established rules of the storyworld. In a Thriller, in particular, the rules surrounding the powers characters have, what they can do and how they can do it, are fundamental to the causality of the plot and the audience’s engagement. 

It’s here that Hanna is a floundering mess.

But first let’s setup up the story of Hanna.

Hanna’s father has kept her isolated from the world in order to keep the government agency from finding them. Having been rather successful at this - building a very cosy home for them in the woods - he then,  for reasons entirely unknown, produces a beacon device and tells Hanna that when she pushes the button the Agency will come and get her. He then takes off in the snow leaving her on her own and saids “see ya in Berlin”….

So Hanna pushes the button…. 

What the Fuck..?? 

Why on god’s earth would she push the fucking button..? The inciting incident of the entire plot is entirely irrational. There is no plausible reason for Hanna to push the button. If her dad is so afraid of the agency and of his daughters safety as to hide her away and train her as a survivalist, then why the hell would he proactively tell the Agency where they are and invite them to come for tea? 

One might suggest that Hanna’s dad had deliberately trained her as an assassin with the express purpose of assassinating the Agency head honcho Marissa Wiegler. But I just don’t buy this, it’s not in the story because at no time do they ever intimate that Hanna’s dad has any purpose in life other than to protect his daughter and HIDE her from the Agency. It’s made perfectly clear in the very first scene at the agency headquarters that the Agency not only have no proactive interest in finding Hanna and her Dad but also that they had, in fact, all but forgotten they existed at all. They only become aware of their existence when they get the signal… Like the nerdy kid from high school you had forgotten until they friend you on Facebook.

Any dramatic tension the film had about a desperate father hiding his daughter in the woods is thrown out the window for the audience when we are told the Agency didn’t actually give a flying fuck about them all along and had no intention of trying to find them.

Certainly a father who trains his daughter as an assassin for the purposes of revenge is a great story setup. But this is NOT the story in Hanna, its simply not there in the portrayal of Hanna’s father who at no time demonstrates or suggests any motivation of revenge. Not to mention that it’s very hard to have a good dramatic revenge story against an antagonist that has forgotten you exist….

From there the film just becomes an amateurish mess of logical inconsistency and ham-fisted self-aware directing. We can see this directly when we list some of the established rules of the Hanna storyworld and how they are broken.

Here are some of the key rules - they are the facts of the story:

1) Hanna has been raised by her father in total isolation, living off the land in snow-bound forrest.

2) Hanna has no experience of the outside or modern world.

3) Hanna has not only been trained to be a super alert killer but is biologically tuned to be a super-solider through DNA manipulation.

4) The government agency employs highly trained ruthless soldiers and killers and will stop at nothing to find and kill Hanna. 

Now let’s look at just a few of the ways Hanna profoundly breaks, ignores and over runs these rules.

When Hanna escapes the underground Agency base and pops her head up in the middle of the Moroccan desert she does through through a 1.5m wide black steel man-hole in the middle of a flat desert road. A convoy of highly trained specialist soldiers in military Humvees patrolling a top-secret military base then proceed to drive ignorantly over the top of her in procession. Now I don’t know about you but if a blonde-headed girl in an orange jumpsuit is standing waist deep in a big black man-hole in the middle of the road while i’m driving along, I’m pretty fucking certain I’d see her. Let alone if you are a highly trained solider patrolling a top-secret base and under orders to look out for an escaped blonde-headed girl who was last seen heading for the ventilation tunnels that lead to black steel man-holes in the desert…!

But the absurdist-fun keeps on coming.

Later Hanna sneaks into a tourist camp with a swimming pool at night. She looks around to check no one is about and then leans down to drink from the pool…. Only to then to jump back in shock and surprise when another young girl pops up from the water to say Hi and tell her that they have a double-date with the two Spanish boys sitting a few meters away. Now call me crazy but if we have a rule that Hanna is a ‘hyper alert, reindeer stalking, killing machine trained to adapt to any circumstances’  then how the fuck did she miss the fact that there were three people within 20meters. Hanna could just about smell her father sneaking up on her in the snow but she cant spot a chubby teenager flopping around in the swimming pool right in front of her..???

But the real clincher that confirms the amateurish carelessness of the script and bumbling inconsistent direction comes when our Hanna encounters technology. A whole early scene is dedicated to Hanna having a spaz-attack, freak out at the overwhelming strangeness of a kettle, a TV and a fluorescent light tube. The over-enthusiastic editor leapt on the opportunity to create a jump-cut nightmare of flashing images to really drive home the point of how totally unfamiliar Hanna was with things like lightbulbs and kettles…. And yet, a mere few days later in story time, Hanna is miraculously able to use a computer to look up detailed information about DNA and secret documents about her father on the Internet.

I write this not so much as a slamming review of Hanna (though it certainly deserves such) but rather to point out the importance of Logic, Plausibility and StoryWorld rules in screenwriting and screen production.

In the case of Hanna I think the ‘Arthouse’ addendum has been nothing more than a distraction to the screenplay. The film seems more concerned with the fairy-tale references or clever spinning camera shots, then of adhering to a consistent narrative world based on causality. All the ‘Arthouse’ in the world wont save the fact that Im continually pulled out of this story by gaping chasms of broken logic. 

Irrespective of genre, Hanna is a film that doesn’t follow its own rule, that lacked internal logic, and in doing so ensured that I was never enveloped or engaged by the story and its fictive world.

The true tragedy of this is that Hanna could have been a great film. Hanna could have been Leon: The Professional. The ideas are strong and compelling. Instead, because of not following its own rules, Hanna is just an eminently forgettable film that - Arthouse or not - will simply slip into obscurity.