Mar. 12, 2008 - Issue #647: Westward Ho

Funny Games

Haneke plays some Funny Games, but they won’t move you

 Peter and Paul, the young antagonists in Funny Games, Aryan, clad in stark white, exuding a sort of robotic idea of politeness, spread through the isolated world of the film like some infectious disease. These boys move from one country house, one family, to another, each time exacting a basically identical program of horrifically violent disaster. They penetrate the home through feigning innocence and asking an innocuous favour, then disarm the resident patriarch and engage the entire clan in a game of terror whose rules are childishly simple yet hopelessly fixed in the assailants’ favour. Watching their campaign unfold is like bearing witness to a nightmare of such deadening inevitability as to be, above all, wearying.

For those following the work of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, watching Funny Games will also provoke considerable déjà vu. Haneke’s not only remaking his own 1997 Austrian film of the same name, but delivering a shot-by-shot duplication: the story, characters, even the lighting, props and layout of the house have been lovingly recreated, only this time in English and with English-language actors. The duplication’s so precise that while watching the new film the viewer can’t help but become distracted by the most incidental shift in detail (Hey, there’s soy milk in the fridge!). 
 

With regard to the performances, it’s hard to gauge what’s largely a matter of linguistic familiarity. Peter and Paul, here played by Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt, do seem slightly more textured. Their victims, Ann, George and Georgie, likewise have one or two moments that caught me off guard. Executive producer Naomi Watts, who seems to possess a special interest in horror remakes (see The Ring, The Ring 2, King Kong and, coming soon, The Birds) is certainly committed, while Tim Roth, in a role previously played by the late Ulrich Mühe, creates what for me is by far the film’s most affecting moment, the scene in which George, suffering unimaginable shock, barely able to stand, asks his wife to forgive him for not being able to somehow prevent the catastrophe that’s beset their family. Overall, however, both versions prompted exactly the same response in me: intrigue, followed by a period of extreme anxiety and repulsion, followed by utter, exasperating boredom, and, once the film was through, a degree of grudging intellectual appreciation.

The ostensible point of Funny Games is to function as a critique of the commodification of violence through numerous, highly calculated attempts at subverting audience expectations. We might expect to see exciting, dynamic violence; we might expect suspense; we might expect to see the antagonists undone by some mixture of ingenuity on the part of their adversaries and unpredictable forces from the world beyond this house under siege: Haneke denies us these things. The problem is that what he’s put in their place are alienation techniques you might expect from some annoyingly smarty-pants film student, such as having the antagonists condescendingly talk directly to the camera or pick up a remote control and rewind back a few minutes so they can correct events in a way that suits them better. There are simply no real rules to Funny Games, a fact which no doubt upsets our bourgeois notions of cathartic drama, but nonetheless does little to implicate us any further in what’s unfolding, because to implicate us we’d need to care a lot more.
 

I greatly admire the films Haneke’s made since the first Funny Games. Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché all succeed where Funny Games fails: they make a deeply troubling spectacle of violence and withhold information as a way to coerce our active participation with the narrative and the layers of significance inherent in it. In his Cineaste review, Richard Porton suggests that Funny Games “is best addressed not in terms of whether it actually works on screen, but as an object that spews out ideas.” 
 

I suppose you do need to actually see Funny Games to be able to appreciate what it has to offer. But do you need to see it in two languages? Do you even need to see it twice? And furthermore, does a violent film need to be so loftily schematic to engage us in questioning how we consume and/or become disaffected by violence? If viewers are required to be self-reflexive anyway, could they not be just as provoked by a smart genre film, say one by Hitchcock, Verhoven or Cronenberg, that’s infused with ideas, auto-critiques and still delivers the goods with regards to emotional investment in story and characters? V  


Opens Fri, Mar 14

Funny Games

Written and directed by Michael Haneke Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth,

Michael Pitt

SSS

www.imdb.com/title/tt0808279/

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