Funny Games

The question that arises while watching Michael Haneke's thriller Funny Games is: why? Not, 'why make a movie about sadistic young home invaders tormenting an upper class family that indicts the audience for watching it and seeks to make the proceedings as repellent as possible?' That's the question that arises while watching Haneke's original German-language version of Funny Games from 1997. This time, the question is: 'why make your English-language film debut with a shot-for-shot remake of your most controversial film?' By way of an answer, I offer two words: George Sluizer.

In 1988, George Sluizer directed a thriller in his native Netherlands called Spoorloos. It's a chilling tale of sociopathology and free will that features one of the most haunting finales in genre film history. It made such an impression on the film community that Hollywood producers threw a bunch of money at Sluizer to make an American remake, 1994's The Vanishing. This film, unlike the original, has an ending that is haunting only for its insulting stupidity. Everything that made the original a memorable experience was obliterated in the name of delivering a "happy" conclusion that would leave audiences mollified. Haneke's remake is a ringing declaration to American film producers and film goers: he ain't going out like that.

Beneath the conventional thriller trappings, Funny Games is about the nature of film representations of violence and the ceaseless demand for it in movies. It was a relevant theme for European audiences in the mid-90s, and its even more pertinent for American film viewers who have made the Saw franchise a cultural phenomenon. Haneke makes his point in the most direct way possible: the vile tormentors turn at several points to face the camera and address the audience, making the viewer an accomplice in the on-screen horrors. The technique is preachy and self-righteous, but it's hard to criticize Haneke too much because of the rigor of his approach and the indelible power of his restrained, elegant shot compositions. Most filmmakers seeking to criticize film violence end up wallowing in hypocrisy by filling the screen with the same bloody images the director decries. Haneke mostly keeps the violence and nudity, you know, the "good stuff," that we as an audience have paid to see, off screen. What he leaves in front of the camera is all of the personal pain, terror and anguish that inevitably accompanies violence in real life, but which is usually left out of film depictions of it. These scenes are hard to watch, but Haneke's refusal to cut away from such moments of distress make them hypnotizing, and shamefully compelling. The viewer finds, to their great unease, that even the nasty aftermath of bloodshed holds its own dark allure. Haneke's strength as a filmmaker is not so much his worldview as his Kubrickian mastery of spaces and framing, which make even his most heavyhanded intellectual experiments, of which Funny Games is surely one, sickly fascinating. Haneke might be a prude, or he might be a visionary, but one way or another his films pack a wallop, and he's here to stay.