Funny Games
Director: Michael Haneke feat. Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, Devon Gearhart, Siobhan Fallon (TBA)
By Wally Hammond
The first things to consider with Funny Games - Michael Haneke's
near shot-for-shot 'Hollywood' refashioning of his 1997 Austrian
intellectual horror - are the tricky matters of context and remakes.
Haneke's original, which saw a holidaying bourgeois family marauded,
for no apparent reason, by a pair of affectless young sociopaths, was a
coruscating critique of cinematic violence disguised cleverly within
the classic lineaments of the, mainly US-made, 'ordeal' shocker. This
new version adds nothing novel, but it lacks none of the original's
bite.
The polite, homicidal, white-glove-wearing house-guests are played,
very menacingly, by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, with Naomi Watts and
Tim Roth - raw and credible - as their terrorised victims. On the
downside, Haneke's decision to leave everything unchanged, down to
every carefully chosen camera angle, makes the film a little
disappointing to his fans, who may feel, like this writer, that with
Code Unknown and Hidden, he had moved beyond the in-your-face
strategies of the old Funny Games.
But Haneke clearly wants to be
where the action is, both morally and commercially. Why preach about
the effects of unexamined representations of violence to the converted,
when you can express it in the consumer heartland? The remake is, then,
a confrontational, political act, and Haneke's cinema is, partly, a
confrontational, political cinema.
If it were only that, Funny Games would be doomed to fail. It's
already been given a cool reception by US critics, keen to warn their
readers of a wolf approaching in sheep's clothing. Some may feel
they've been over-protective. Funny Games has the appearance of a genre
chiller, precisely because it is one - and a bloody good one at that;
and, while it may play games with audience expectations, what good
horror film doesn't?
Many horror films crumble on close inspection.
Funny Games, though, looks sturdier the harder you look and tends to
throw the genre as a whole under the microscope, or at least those of
the more morally suspect variety. Many such films trade on fake
re-assurance, not genuine fears.
Pitt and Corbet's psychopaths are as unfathomable a couple of
evil-doers as we've seen since Hitchcock paired John Dall and Farley
Granger in Rope - and what could be more frightening than that? Haneke
shares much in common with Hitchcock, notably his awesome cinematic
precision. But here he goes further than even Hitch dared, by
questioning the very basis of horror's entertainment value, not least
by inviting us to consider our complicity in consuming the images that
haunt our worst nightmares.
Where Funny Games has a problem,
then, may not be in its failure but rather in its success. It's not
that it has no shocks, but that they cut too deep - not only to our
fears of the unexpected, of harm, but also right to the base of our
power-relations, and notions of dignity, love, honour and
self-sacrifice. It's not a reassuring vision but that's not the name of
Haneke's particular game.
For more read our interview with Michael Haneke - Director of Funny Games