THERE'S NOTHING PARTICULARLY funny about Funny Games. Michael Haneke's near shot-for-shot Hollywood remake of his 1997 Austrian thriller is just as gruelling, intense and upsetting as the original – and just as provocative, hypocritical and contemp
tuous of its audience. Relocating the story to the American East Coast, its set-up, look and execution are almost exactly the same: a bourgeois couple and their young son (played by Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and newcomer Devon Gearhart) arrive at their lakeside holiday home where they're promptly subjected to a series of sadistic games by a couple of chillingly polite, white clad, glove-wearing sociopaths (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet).
As in the original, these boys are presented as the end products of our media age: motiveless sickos whose minds have (we're encouraged to believe) apparently been warped by too much exposure to violent movies, television and, in one of the film's few updates, video games. Haneke, meanwhile, turns the torture of the family into yet another finger-wagging condemnation of our own relationship with screen violence by repeatedly setting up genre conventions then breaking the fourth wall to over-turn them. That he's able to reduce us to a pool of nervous sweat in the process (even if you've seen the original and know exactly what's coming) attests to his technical brilliance as a filmmaker: he understands how cinema works, how powerful a medium it is and how effectively it can be used to manipulate an audience to a specific end. Alas, that end has always been a little problematic.
The first film, for instance, was intended as a moral corrective for post-Tarantino audiences who consumed violence as ironic entertainment. In typically humourless fashion, Haneke told a shocked Cannes audience at the time that anybody who walked out of the film didn't need it, and anybody who stayed did. Yet the presumption that anyone who enjoys watching cinematic violence can't – or won't – engage with its effects without having it spelled out to them in capital letters was somewhat patronising. Furthermore, the irony seemed to escape Haneke entirely that by insisting his film had an educational purpose he was effectively giving us permission to get off on his own intense, highly stylised brutality.
The remake's new American context succeeds only in compounding all this. Haneke has always insisted that Funny Games was an American story at heart and the original's low Stateside visibility has been cited as justification enough for remaking it, particularly at a time when films such as Saw and Hostel earn big bucks from presenting gruesome images of torture as entertainment. But Haneke's merciless targeting of US pop culture was way off the mark in the first film and replicating it verbatim here (Beavis and Butt-Head is, apparently, still the root of all evil and not at all a satirical sideswipe at the MTV generation) exposes Haneke's thesis for what it is: the knee-jerk reaction of an outraged, ageing intellectual who, by his own admission, is not fluent in English and thus, quite possibly, doesn't comprehend the subversive nature of much of what he's condemning. Ironically, Funny Games works best on the level Haneke doesn't want it to: as a sort of intellectual Scream played for intensity rather than laughs.
The full article contains 553 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
