It is customary to describe film directors who keep a tight rein on their audience’s responses, who coldly and meticulously manipulate emotion, as sadists. Not necessarily in a bad way; filmmaking is to a large degree an art of control. Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg can all, with some justice, be accused of sadism, a charge that hardly detracts from — indeed, that helps to explain — the way they provide entertainment.
Michael Haneke, an Austrian auteur who has worked for many years in France, has always been more interested in punishing his audience than in entertaining it. His scrupulously constructed, skillfully made films, many of which have won prizes at leading international festivals, are excruciatingly suspenseful and also, more often than not, clammy and repellent.
It is likely that Haneke would take the last two adjectives as praise — it’s fine with me if they show up in advertisements — or at least as the acknowledgment of fulfilled intentions. His is an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism. We will endure the pain he inflicts for our own good, and feel bad about it in the bargain.
Funny Games, Haneke’s first English-language film — and a compulsively faithful replica of his notorious 1997 German-language feature of the same title — subjects its viewers to a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality. So, of course, do countless other movies, though few of them can claim this one’s artistic pedigree or aesthetic prestige. And indeed, the conceit of Funny Games is that it offers a harsh, exacting critique of vulgar, violent amusements, a kind of homeopathic treatment for a public numbed and besotted by the casual consumption of images of suffering. That the new version takes place in America is part of the point, since Americans — to a European intellectual this almost goes without saying — are especially deserving of the kind of moral correction Haneke takes it upon himself to mete out.
Our problem is that we think violence is fun. Well, the fun stops here, people. Ann and George (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) drive out to the country with their young son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), towing their lovely wooden sailboat behind their Land Rover and listening to opera CDs. As they settle into their tasteful, gated vacation home, the family is confronted by two well-spoken young sociopaths, who in the course of the following night torment them with a knife, a gun, a golf club and impeccable prep school manners. These fellows variously address each other as Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butt-Head (Leopold and Loeb would have given the game away), and they are played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet.
Pitt, blue-eyed and baby-faced, appears to be the calm, ironical alpha predator, while Corbet, acting skittish and high-strung, looks like the weaker, crazier one. But that might just be part of the game they and Haneke are playing, since the whole point of Peter and Paul is that they function without identifiable motive or affect.
When asked by George — his leg smashed, his hands tied, his eyes wide with terror — “Why are you doing this?,” Pitt’s character responds with answers that parody the kind of facile backstory usually applied in cases like this: unhappy childhood; sexual instability; class resentment; bad education. All of it is facetious, and none of it explains anything.
In his better movies — I admit to a qualified admiration for Code Inconnu (2000), The Piano Teacher (2001), The Time of the Wolf (2003) and Cache (2005) — Haneke uses extremity and shock to illuminate social and psychological realities, or at least possibilities. His ideas are often facile encapsulations of chic conventional wisdom about the terrible consequences of sexual repression, economic privilege or racial hypocrisy, but his formal dexterity gives these films a creepy power nonetheless.
You may try to dismiss what they are saying (which is basically that you, bourgeois cultural prestige-monger that you are, should congratulate yourself for having purchased a dose of Haneke’s contempt), but their unsettling effects are not so easy to shake.
To some extent, the same is true of Funny Games, which efficiently induces a state of panic and dread, and which features some fine bits of acting, especially from Pitt and Watts. The images Haneke puts on screen (they are shot with crisp, glossy-magazine elegance by Darius Khondji) are shocking, but they don’t unfold with the usual slasher-movie jolts of grisliness. The camera frequently stands still as the horror unfolds just beyond its range, and when a bloody event takes place, we are likely to be shown the face of a passive witness rather than that of the perpetrator or the victim.
“Why don’t you just kill us and get it over with?” George whimpers. His would-be killer’s reply — “What about entertainment?” — carries beyond the screen, where the voyeuristic masses are implicated in the gruesome spectacle of senseless cruelty. Are we, though? What if the guilt trip never takes off? Or, even worse, what if the American audience, cretins that we are, were to embrace Haneke’s vision not for its moral stringency but for the thrill of, say, watching Watts, bound at the ankles and wrists, hop around in her underwear? Who will be implicated then? I started out by calling Haneke a sadist, but it seems to me that he may be too naive, too delicate, to merit that designation, which should be reserved only for the greatest filmmakers.
At least with the remade Funny Games, Haneke shows a certain kinship with someone like Eli Roth, whose Hostel movies have brought nothing but scorn from responsible critics. (If Haneke wanted to break into the American market, rather than take solace in the ambivalent embrace of the intelligentsia, he should have undertaken not a remake but a sequel.) The Hostel pictures and their ilk revel in the pornography of blood and pain, which Haneke addresses with mandarin distaste, even as he feeds the appetite for it.
Like Peter and Paul, who wear immaculate white gloves as they go about their awful business, Funny Games tries to insulate itself from its own awfulness in the fine cloth of self-consciousness. On a few occasions Pitt turns to address the audience directly, mocking us for rooting for Ann and George’s survival, deriding our desire for neat resolutions. At these moments, using techniques that might have seemed audacious to an undergraduate literary theory class in 1985 or so, the film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.
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