The first episode of a TV film in two parts, each with the length of a feature. Lemminge I is set in the autumn of 1959 in the rural village Wiener Neustadt in Niederösterreich. The film has five different protagonists around 18 years old, all in their last year at the local school. The oppressive post-war atmosphere sometimes has a fatal effect on the youths. They try to escape the suffocating environment by tasting forbidden fruit, perpetrating vandalism or, in the most extreme case, by committing suicide. The odd one escapes more simply by travelling to Vienna; others don’t escape and are swallowed by their middle-class surroundings, for instance by a shot-gun wedding.Haneke has obviously drawn on his own experience. He paints the atmosphere of his own youth. The occasionally melancholy tone of the film was not appreciated by everyone when it was broadcast on Austrian television (in 1979). The extreme precision of the mise-en-scène, in combination with sombre and sensitive themes which were so praised in his later films made for cinema screening is already present in a strikingly balanced form in Lemminge I.
