Funny Games (1998)
It’s a bit too flattering to the film to be enraged by Funny Games, the original Michael Haneke picture that’s inspired the shot for shot remake (also by Haneke) that is currently playing in theatres. Funny Games is a horror movie re-staged as an elitist, post-modern wank; think Straw Dogs by way of Godard, only stripped of the profundity of either, and you’ve got the general idea. People complain that the film is hypocritical and a bit of a cheat (and it is hypocritical) but the real problem is that it fails even by its own ambitions.
The film isn’t a cheat, as many have said. Haneke may claim to hate the exploitive, violent, largely American thrillers that are the source of his ire here, but he clearly gets off on them. The first hour of Funny Games is legitimately tense; Haneke, like any crank contemptuous of his audience, excels at the sort of audience manipulation that he supposedly resents, playing the quiet suburban dread against his viewers in a way that recalls early Polanski.
A family of three (Ulrich Mühe, Susanne Lothar, Stefan Clapczynski, all effective) drive toward their vacation home in a series of opening bird’s eye view shots that clearly recall The Shining and eventually stop at their neighbors to confirm that a golf date the next day is still on. The neighbors are strange, but tell the family that tomorrow is indeed still a go. The wife asks the husband who those two boys in the white were. The husband seems to remember one of the neighbor’s brothers having a boy in business school.
As the family unpacks, one of the young men knocks on the door and asks the wife if he could trouble her for a few eggs, the neighbors are making something. This conversation over the eggs, and its intangible slip from the banal to the terrifying (I had to re-watch it), is the one truly brilliant scene in the film. But the brilliance highlights the film’s schizophrenia: Funny Games claims to punish us for our jollies while really just giving us the jollies with a chase of self-delusion; embodied by such second-rate tricks as fourth wall shattering commentary and, most famously, a blunt, Brechtian switcheroo near the end of the film.
I went in to Funny Games with the mind to like it. I admit that I’m a bit of a contrarian at heart, if everyone hates a film I probably want to get something out of it. But Haneke’s tricks nurture the tension rather than subvert it. The first time one of the killers addresses us, with a wink as the wife discovers her unfortunate dog, is unsettling in a conventional thriller way, and doesn’t work as disruption or satire. The film’s ending has the same problem; it doesn’t work because it IS authentically cathartic. I’ve read Haneke’s interviews and he would appear to be an intelligent man, but does he honestly find his bad guys emerge victorious only to torture another family ending subversive? One can find a variation of this ending in any less hip to hate slasher film.
A few months ago I watched a similarly themed horror picture that unnerved me, and succeeded in shaming me for my appreciation of disreputable, gory pictures. That film was The Girl Next Door, a direct to DVD release that didn’t get a tenth of the new Funny Games’ ink because it was made by Gregory Wilson, an unknown filmmaker who is unfashionable to love or hate. That film dared the audience to actually consider the moral ramifications of the sort of blood lust that they normally clap for, Funny Games is just a self-hating, confused example of the usual usual, with none of the lasting power of Girl, much less Repulsion, or Knife in the Water or the original The Vanishing. The problem with the Brecht approach is that you can’t change most audience members (particular the audience Haneke’s targeting here) by appealing to their minds, it’s emotions that save the day in the film game. Haneke could have at least probably succeeded in his aim if he had the courage of his convictions. He shouldn’t have bothered to the end the film at all, cutting us off mid-sentence, no catharsis, no ending, nothing to
★★½
