Michael Haneke is an audience-hater, a bourgeois-baiter, a cinematic terrorist. He makes films that provoke and unsettle. He’s insistent, insidious. He’s subversive. He’s a creep. A shit. But he’s a genius.
His latest, Funny Games, might as well come with a flashing neon sign that bellows ‘Fuck You!’ at all who see it. From the minute that the tinkling tones of opera in the film’s opening credits are usurped by a hammering wail of heavy metal, he sets about systematically unmanning his audience, just as Anna, George and their son are abused by their tormentors. They, at least, will eventually be put out of their misery. We, on the other hand, will be left to stew.
Anybody with even a passing interest in Haneke’s films will know that Anna (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) are in trouble from the moment we see their spotless Range Rover, their big holiday house and their swanky lives. They’re exactly the kind of aspirational WASPs he skewered in Hidden, and here again they’re going to get a wake-up call they’ll never forget. It comes in the shape of ‘Peter’ and ‘Paul’ (Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt) two terrifyingly ordinary boys who are about to demonstrate a capacity for extraordinary cruelty.
In an era of endless property shows and a house price obsession, there’s a delicious frisson in watching the walls of somebody’s castle crumble around them, as George and Anna realise the full extent of what they’re in for. But what begins as exquisite torture quickly becomes something else altogether as Haneke reveals that he has no respect for the moral limits of human behaviour.
And – thrillingly, outrageously – no respect for the boundaries of cinema. One particular scene will have audiences shrieking in outrage. ‘It’s not fair,’ they’ll say. ‘You can’t do that!’ And indeed, you can’t. ‘But why?’ asks Haneke, coolly and calmly. ‘You say you’re tired of soulless blockbusters and genre formula, well watch me rip up the rulebook and start again.’ Always one step ahead of his audience, he dares us to be outraged because it justifies the brutality of his own actions.
The film’s nihilism is devastating. And more so for the fact that it’s a remake – an actual, shot-for-shot retread of a film Haneke has already made before in French. It adds another layer of galling, provocative pointlessness, of that sensational senselessness that bites and gnaws at us as an audience and challenges us either to find a reason (impossible!) or simply accept that there doesn’t need to be one. And that, right there, is the point. In the film’s final scene, Peter tells Paul of his theory about the universe: fiction, he says, is as real as reality. False is true, black is white, and Michael Haneke has produced a startling, recidivist attack on lazy passivity of cinema that’s as difficult to watch as it is to forget.
Is it me, or do I have a massive urge to see this film!
Written by Oliver C on April 12th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
I don’t think anyone except you knows the answer to that…
Written by Fwank on April 14th, 2008 at 10:05 am
I’m very interested in your review, and would like to know if you’ve seen the 1997 version of the same film, also directed by Haneke. I’m keen to compare them both. =) If you’ve done so, it would be very kind of you to write something up about seeing both.
Written by Alana Smithee on April 16th, 2008 at 5:46 am
“His latest, Funny Games, might as well come with a flashing neon sign that bellows ‘Fuck You!’ at all who see it.” Why would I want to see this film then? I was intrigued and still am, but am not really in the mood for a two hour lecture on why I shouldn’t be watching the film in the first place.
Written by Joe C on April 18th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
@Joe C…
Just curious, man. No need to get all cranky.
Written by Alana Smithee on April 19th, 2008 at 1:11 am
If you can put films like SAW on the big screen, why can’t you put Funny games? You can switch the title and it won’t heart either of them… Of course you can do Funny games 4 as well the abyss of the human imagine is bottomless… at least at first glance. The true is that we are as shallow as plate of soup… The question is not how sick is Haneke? The question is how sick is someone who needs to see his shallowness projected on the screen… Go ahead Mr. Haneke show us how shallow we can be… There are young aspiring filmmakers outside strungling to get support for really good ideas, in the same time we confronted with films like Funny games, which only quality is the “The End” take. Give up Michael you will never learn it.
Written by ianbbian on April 19th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Hello everyone
To Joe C: I understand this idea that Funny Games feels like being ‘lectured’ for two hours, but I’m not sure I agree with it. I think that implies a degree of glibness, or smugness, that the film doesn’t have. I reckon (and I’m speculating as I’ve never met the dude) that if you asked Haneke if he thought he was morally superior to the people who watch his films - is he in a position to lecture them - I think he’d say ‘no’. What I took away from Funny Games was a kind of scorched earth view of humanity: we’re all as bad as each other… We’re all fucked, but at least some of us know it. And yeah, that’s not exactly a positive sentiment to take away after two gruelling hours in a cinema, but at the same time, there’s something compellingly uncomplicated about just how nihilistic it is. Does that make sense? I didn’t feel hectored or even particularly chastened, but I did spend a long, long time thinking about what a film like Funny Games ‘means’ for cinema - what are its responsibilities? Its limits? Can it ever stand apart from it audience? Must it always be as complicit as we are? More so? Not sure if that is particularly clear - I think it’s hard to find clarity in a film like Funny Games, but I do think that to write it off as ‘lecturing’ as, for instance Mark Kermode did, is unfair. But fuck me, do I not want to see it again… Thanks for commenting everyone.
Written by Matt on April 21st, 2008 at 1:44 pm