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Game and match

A disturbing film where the audience is guilty
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 20th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Golf balls aren't as messy as eggs and human bodies. Michael Pitt, above.
Funny Games


Directed by Michael Haneke
With Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet
One funny game is the grim, psychological one we play with ourselves while watching human slaughter on the screen. The brute routine of murderous thrillers, hatchet horrors and torture porn seldom varies — we happily consent to bear witness to the brutalization or destruction of a fellow human’s body, as long as we can be assured of the evil perpetrators’ eventual punishment.
The game lies in choosing to see ourselves not as sadistic voyeurs, complicit in the cinematic bloodbath we’ve chosen, but as innocent punters. In our ethical vanity, we believe ourselves “shocked” by the outrages flickering before us, whereas the truth is that we’ve paid good money to vicariously injure and maim. The screen’s murderers and monsters (our stand-ins and scapegoats) will finally meet capture or death, which will serve as our catharsis. They are the guilty ones, after all. And having exercised and shed our primitive, blood-drunk impulses in a darkened cinema, the lights go up and we leave. End of game.
Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games is an almost exact remake of his 1997 Austrian film of the same title. His intent is to shake us from our delusions of innocence while we’re watching brutalities by fully implicating us in the proceedings, thus ruining the game. The writer Rebecca West once wrote that “any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.” Haneke most certainly succeeds in starting an argument with his film. But is it art?
The film’s setup starts familiarly: A family arriving at their summer home for a holiday is soon held hostage by two lethal, preppy young men whose intention is to torture and murder them. The territory is so familiar that we quickly settle back to enjoy the family’s terror. Naomi Watts, as the young wife and mother, will surely be sexually humiliated and made to cry: Her tears will be the film’s equivalent of a porn movie’s “money shot.” Tim Roth, as her husband, will undoubtedly be forced to watch his wife’s agonies, having somehow been made physically incapable (that is to say, impotent) to act. Roth and Watts are stars, however, and so at least one of them will manage to bring down their attackers — that is standard procedure.
It’s the conventional plottery found even in Eli Roth’s Hostel gornos, where one of the fresh-scrubbed, American co-ed victims will rise victoriously from the slaughterhouse floor at the finale. (The Saw franchise is the exception, as the victims are themselves criminal, and so we are afforded the type of smug, judgmental entertainment that primitive Christians believe will be available in heaven’s viewing rooms of hell.)
Haneke, however, is having none of this. The family of three arrives at its gated getaway carefree (Haneke loves toying with our love-hate class envy), though they have just passed through one of the most unsettling scenes in recent cinema. Near their house they stop and call through another gate to good friends, who are standing in their yard with two young men. The friends don’t answer. They stand silently under the diffuse light of midday, immobile. It’s a chilling moment and preview of what’s to come.
The young men, Peter (Brady Corbet) and Paul (Michael Pitt) soon come calling. Peter makes his way into the house by convincing Ann (Watts) that one of their silent friends from the earlier scene has sent him to borrow some eggs. Ann is at first happy to help, until Peter starts dropping the eggs and demanding more. This series of menacing “accidents” prefaces the family dog being killed, the husband, George (Roth), on the floor with a broken kneecap, and the young son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), cowering in a corner. Soon, the family is ushered, ironically, into the living room for a long, horrifying night of “games.”
The torture begins. Halfway through one ordeal, Ann will cry out, “Why don’t you just kill us?” Peter smilingly replies, “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” If that doesn’t jar us, Paul soon will. After telling the three captives that they will all be dead by morning, Paul suddenly turns and looks out toward the audience. “What do you think?,” he asks us. “Think they stand a chance?” This Brechtian gambit, an abrupt breaking of the “fourth wall,” continues throughout the rest of the film.
The whole barbarous artifice of Funny Games is really an elaborate interrogation of us, the audience. We may well feel as felinely batted about as the bloodied family, who really haven’t much chance, since even if they do get the upper hand, Paul merely has to grab a remote control and rewind time to the point where he can regain mastery.
It’s a clever film, but who is it for? The average gorehound would find it too “weird” to be effective, and fans of Haneke’s work (The Piano Teacher, Caché) will have read their Susan Sontag and simply enjoy Haneke’s device as stylishly provocative, but not terribly original. It’s a troubling bit of art, imperfect, certainly, and I’d like to think necessary. But the games will continue on long after it’s forgotten.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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