52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 26. JACK (Director: Elisabeth Scharang)
Pictured: Johannes Krisch and Corinna Harfouch in a scene from the fact-based Austrian film, 'Jack', directed by Elisabeth Scharang. Still: Petro Domenigg, Filmstills.at
The film Jack that
most people know is the one starring Robin Williams as a 10 year old boy with
an ageing disease. He looks like he hit puberty aged two and a half, that’s
tough. As for breastfeeding - the film didn’t go there. There is another Jack, not Daniels or Nicholson or one
half of a nursery rhyme power couple with Jill, but Unterweger. He was a
convicted killer turned prison poet and the subject of Austrian writer-director
Elisabeth Scharang’s 2015 film.
Scharang, born in February 1969, is the daughter of writer
Michael Scharang, who was featured in her first film, the 2001 documentary Normal Zeiten (Normal Times). She forged
a career in documentaries and television movies. Jack, released in Austria in September 2015, is her second feature
film for cinema, following Vielleicht in
einem anderen Leben (In Another Lifetime) in 2011.
Jack begins with
the title character (Johannes Krisch) and his young girlfriend, Marlene
(Valerie Pachner) fleeing from a convenience store with bottles of liquor, one
of which Marlene drops. They go back to her home. Outside they spy Marlene’s
neighbour. Jack and Marlene’s reputation precedes them. The young woman is
encouraged to meet Jack. But he has no intention of letting her out of his
sight and (off camera) kills her.
The next time we see Jack, he is in prison. His writing
attracts (at least) two fans, Susanne (Corinna Harfouch) who, when he is
released from prison in 1990, sets him up in an apartment, and Marlies (Birgit
Minichmayr) who sets him up with an editor. Jack becomes a cause celebre – he
is acclaimed as an authentic man of the underclass. His relationship with
Susanne has limits, and his life becomes more complicated when his mother shows
up. Then Jack is investigated in connection with a series of brutal murders of
prostitutes that occur in areas that he is visited. There is no physical
evidence that ties him to the crimes – DNA matching was in its infancy in the
early 1990s, when the last part of the film takes place. Jack denies his
involvement and takes to investigating the crimes himself.
If you read a report about Jack Unterweger, it describes him
as a serial killer. The film has doubts. He was undoubtedly guilty of the first
murder, but Scharang’s film suggests that there may have been a serial killer
who stalked his every move and took advantage. This theory isn’t exactly borne
out by the film. Serial killers who assume another killer’s identity don’t stop
when that killer has been apprehended – Jack eventually went to trial. So the
doppelganger killer is a conceit, perhaps a way to represent Unterweger’s
fragile mental state. You might conclude that he didn’t remember committing the
murders.
In presenting her theory that Jack wasn’t responsible for
the later murders, Scharang appears to empathise with Unterweger’s female fans.
If writing did indeed provide an alternative outlet for Jack’s anti-social
energy – he authored the autobiography ’Purgatory or Trip to Jail – Report of a
Guilty Man’, Scharang appears to believe in art as salvation.
Jack was born Johann Unterweger in August 1950, the son of a
prostitute and an American G.I. serving in the Allied Forces. To say he had an
unhappy childhood is no exaggeration – he was passed on to his grandfather who
beat him and an aunt, who was later murdered.
He was said to see his mother in the 18 year old German, Margret
Schafer, whom he strangled with her bra. The film doesn’t stint on showing
Jack’s brutal side, exacerbated by his hatred of people leaving for America –
when the girl mentions this ambition, it makes Jack angry.
Jack is the protagonist rather than the object of an
investigation. But we never get inside his head. At some points we appear to
gain some understanding of him. Yet the film’s conceit is that he is a reformed
yet still explosive anti-hero who is part journalist, investigating his own
crimes and interviewing the police officer leading the murder hunt.
The film faithfully recreates Jack’s talk show appearance in
his smart white suit (one captioned photograph describes him as ‘posing like a
dandy from the 1920s’, and shows his Ford Mustang, bearing the number plate ‘W
– Jack 1’. It describes how the evidence against him was circumstantial – no
one witnessed him with the victims. To the end, Jack was said to have protested
his innocence.
Why doesn’t Scharang come on the side of received opinion,
that Unterweger was a skilled manipulator who hung himself because he couldn’t
fool anyone anymore? Perhaps it is
because the evidence allows for an alternative, a belief in rehabilitation.
Jack isn’t a
particularly satisfying film. It might have benefited from being a straight
biography, or telling his story from the point of view of one of the women who
befriended him. The film doesn’t have a point of view but a theory. Scharang is
saying something about objective truth being illusory even in apparent ‘open
and shut’ cases. Perhaps her documentary training has taught her to distrust
the singular version.
Johannes Krisch, who also starred in In Another Lifetime is a handsome leading man of the Scott
Glenn-Viggo Mortensen mould. You can see why women found Jack physically
attractive. The film is at its most
interesting in scenes with his mother – he appears to respect her, still. One
of the more powerful non-violent scenes occurs when Susanne reveals her support
for him.
Review originally published on Bitlanders.com
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