Funny Games (1997)-Norbert Brown
Funny Games (1997)
By Norbert Brown
There’s nothing odd or inappropriate about recycling a good story – Shakespeare did it all the time, and although film remakes are not generally as good as the originals, there’ve been exceptions (let’s not forget – The Wizard of Oz was silent the first time around!). But it seemed that critics and audiences alike agreed that the idea that Gus Van Sant experimented with when he remade Psycho in 1998 with Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche – and matched every frame to the Hitchcock original – didn’t ultimately pan out into anything worth doing again.
Which makes the release of the American version of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games in early 2008 noteworthy. Reportedly, this is a frame-by-frame remake of the Austrian film of the same name, although the original is so bleak it’s hard to imagine an American studio exec who would let the story pass through intact. Its release is scheduled just a year past the original’s 10th birthday, which is long before the first film has attained any sort of “classic” status. Most intriguing of all, it’s a remake by the same director who made the original.
But although the 1997 Funny Games can’t properly be called a classic just yet, it is certainly a memorable and influential film. Funny Games was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes in ‘97, and made an impressive showing in several other major festivals and critic circles that year. Even without a lot of fanfare and with only modest distribution, it’s become, over the last decade, part of the vocabulary of film criticism and established its place as a one-of-a-kind work. That is, until next year when it becomes a two-of-a-kind work.
On the surface, Funny Games (I’m talking about the 1997 original here) is a thriller – and a deeply disturbing one. A nice, ordinary family – mother, father, school-age son – arrive at their lake house for vacation. Everything is fresh and white and bathed in sunlight; you can practically feel the cool breeze off the lake as you sit in the theater. A visitor arrives, and you see him first through the screen door: he’s a handsome young man, dressed well and with a friendly smile. His name is Peter, and he and his friend Paul are staying next door and have come by to borrow some eggs. The mother invites them in, and the film’s placid façade is shattered.
This is the first time (but by no means the last) that Haneke makes us squirm during the 104 minutes of this movie. These guys look like they could be a couple of Back Street Boys lost in the woods, but within moments we discover that they’re two of the most evil, sadistic characters on film. It’s a transformation reminiscent of the Biergarten scene in Cabaret, when the fresh-faced young man with the sweet tenor voice is revealed to be a Hitler Youth. But while in Cabaret all we see is the boy’s uniform; in Funny Games we watch as Paul and Peter delight in the family’s spiraling terror and their own unspeakable violence.
But worse: we don’t just watch, we actually participate. This is where the brilliance and sheer awfulness of the movie really comes through – with glib asides and winks at the camera, Haneke’s villains include the audience in their torture of this family. It’s something akin to – but much worse than – the feeling you get when you’re trapped at a cocktail party in the company of someone who tells racist or scatological jokes at the top of their lungs. But instead of looking uncomfortable and sipping your merlot, you find you have to sit in your chair and watch helplessly as these three people are tortured and humiliated. And Haneke heightens your sense of yourself as a helpless (but somehow willing) accomplice with some of the most unsettling, voyeuristic camerawork I’ve ever seen: sometimes at particularly harrowing moments for the victims neither they nor the camera move much for minutes at a time, so you feel as though you’re trapped in the room with them. And when the mother, bound and gagged, has to hop through the house to get a knife from the kitchen to free herself, you watch every desperate, undignified moment in real time. But Haneke is deliberate and selective about which moments he shares, and often the bloodiest and most dramatic scenes, which another director might feature, happen entirely off camera or just out of frame.
So what is the purpose of all this, and what makes it worthwhile, even brilliant? Well, Haneke is holding a mirror up to a mirror; he’s making a movie that is violent, but that is also a movie about violence. And he is forcing us as viewers to examine the role we play simply by watching. He’s not allowing us the distance we are accustomed to: even though we may be in a dark theater or the comfort of our living room, he’s demanding that we acknowledge that violence is not a spectator sport. The only available roles are victim and perpetrator, and he’s telling us that by watching silently we’re in cahoots with the perp. And he argues that reality is relative – at a certain point it stops mattering whether the violence we’re watching is happening on the street or on the screen: the human toll is just as high in either case.
It’s a powerful message, and it hits you viscerally. Watching this movie is uncomfortable; it is not lewd or seductive, not even all that gory, but after a while you begin to feel as though you’re watching something pornographic. It’s unsettling, it’s upsetting, and it will stay with you for quite a while.
So now comes the $64,000 question: why is he making this movie all over again? Well, putting aside for a moment strictly commercial considerations – a bigger budget, some well-known actors in the featured roles (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play the terrorized couple), and studio backing, there are a couple of legitimate artistic reasons that Haneke may have decided to undertake this project now.
For one, the original Funny Games was made before the terrorist bombings of recent years in New York, London and Madrid. Although the film’s antagonists are both apolitical and amoral, we as a culture – even a global culture – have a different sensibility about terror now, and Haneke may be looking to re-examine the terror in this movie in this light.
Or, more likely, he may be making a simple and disturbing statement: it’s ten years later, and nothing has changed. We still look away from violence in the real world, pretending it’s not there because it doesn’t touch us personally, and we still tolerate it (or even revel in it) in our entertainment. Maybe he wants to teach us this lesson about violence all over again, because we just didn’t learn it the first time.
The American remake of Funny Games, starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, and directed by Michael Haneke, is scheduled for release through Warner Independent Pictures on February 15, 2008.
Copyright C 2007 Norbert Brown