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.
Photo: Petro Domenigg, FILMSTILLS.AT
