Funny Games

Funny Games


Peter Bradshaw
Friday April 4, 2008
The Guardian


Michael Haneke's new movie is an Americanised replica-remake of his 1997 cult shocker Funny Games: just as before, it's an icy ordeal of sadism, a macabre vivisectional experiment in pure cruelty, practised upon a bland upper-middle-class family - two parents, tousle-haired kid, adorable dog - which thinks itself safe in its prosperous cocoon. And just as before, it caused my stomach muscles gradually to contract to about a sixth of their original volume. Repeat performance this may be, but its brilliance and technique and ingenuity are still in a different league from anything else around. It is horrifying, genuinely horrifying, in a way that regular horror films never are, and somehow never expected to be.

 

PJ O'Rourke once wrote that there are two kinds of dangerous: fun-dangerous, like speedboats and race-cars, and not-fun-dangerous, like open-heart surgery or the South Bronx. Haneke is a great believer in making us experience the second kind of dangerous. What his target American audience will make of this is anyone's guess: maybe the National Rifle Association will use it as a recruitment video. Or maybe it will be the surprise smash of 2008 and Haneke can franchise it out to every foreign-language territory in the world.

It is famously not explicit in the usual sense: you don't see the actual gory impacts. But it is explicit in a far more horrible way, making us live through the anticipatory fear, and giving us a closeup view of the victims' horror and despair. The critical convention with violent movies is to compare them to Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and there is an obvious similarity here: after a while, you will feel, like Malcolm McDowell's punished delinquent, that you are watching with your eyelids clipped open.

A well-to-do couple arrive at their fancy vacation house with their little boy for a sailing holiday; they were played in the first film by Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar, and here by the appreciably more sleek and glam Tim Roth and Naomi Watts. Two well-spoken, but strange young men appear at their door, and their impeccable manners, and apparent membership of the rich white people's club, gains them easy access. The nightmare begins from here.

Since the first version came out 11 years ago, the ostensible meaning of Funny Games has been extensively rehearsed. Its point, runs the consensus, is to confront us with our hypocritical taste for the ersatz clown-violence of modern Hollywood in its various genres. Haneke's violence, evidently offered as a monumental rebuke, is not funny, or stylish, or sexy, or even particularly dramatic, but is simply and remorselessly unpleasant. There are not even any real plot developments to disperse or deflect the agony.

Perhaps distracted by Haneke's own rather gnomic and preachy comments on this theme, pundits have I think attributed too much pure moralism to his work and therefore found it tiresome and disingenuous. But this second Funny Games, in repeating itself so exactly - and moreover refusing any of the contemporary post-9/11 spin that another director might have wanted to add - breaks off the crust of commentary and lets us see Haneke's creepy situationist genius afresh: the creation of pure existential fear and turmoil for its own sake. (Haneke's satanic assailants are incidentally not at all like US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan; they are closer to being terrorists, artists of terror, purer than al-Qaida in that they act without motive or ideology.)

I sometimes wonder if Haneke's own thesis on terror is spurious. Could he be just the ringmaster of his self-enclosed cinema of cruelty? Like the twisted clinician he is, he knows exactly how to make us wince and squirm and gibber. His torturers will remind us it is only a film, an invention, but one we have licensed with our ticket-purchase; they will breach the fourth wall, speak directly into the camera, rewind the action when it doesn't suit them. The immediate effect is not moralistic. It is simply an inspired way of adding about 30% to the general anguish.

Haneke's remake is so precise that the only thing that is really different is the size of the mobile phone: Mühe was probably more responsive than Tim Roth as the husband and Arno Frisch a colder, steelier demon in the original than Michael Pitt - though these nuances are beside the point. Haneke believed in the formal technical perfection of the original and sees no reason to change it, other than to apply a new US context to sock it over to the Americans. It isn't in the spirit of Ozu or Hitchcock, who remade but redeveloped their own works, yet neither exactly in the obviously commercial spirit of George Sluizer's unhappy remake of The Vanishing. The closest comparison is Gus van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, and Haneke isn't exactly burdened with false modesty.

As for addressing what has happened to America and the world since 1997, Haneke has arguably already responded creatively with his great 2005 masterpiece Hidden, in which a well-to-do couple is terrorised, but for intelligible reasons arising from race and empire. The existence of that film arguably makes the new Funny Games look somewhat callow and regressive, but there is a fascination in seeing the bad dream become a recurring nightmare, in seeing it live once more, horribly new and defamiliarised. How very feeble genre horror looks compared to this.

apparent – oczywisty, widoczny

assailant- agresor

bland – mdły, nijaki, bez wyrazu

callow - niedoświadczony

crust – skorupa, powłoka

deflect – odpierać, odciągać

delinquent - przestępczy

disingenuous - nieszczery

disperse - rozpraszać

gibber – bełkotać, mówić od rzeczy

gory – krwawy, ociekający krwią

icy - lodowaty

impeccable – nienaganny, nieskazitelny

ordeal - gehenna

ostensible – rzekomy, pozorny

pundit – mędrzec; krytyk

rebuke – reprymenda, nagana

sleek - lśniący

spurious – nieprawdziwy, złudny

squirm – wić się, skręcać się

tousle-haired - rozczochrany

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