Even if you do not recognize the name, you most-likely encountered Austrian director
Michael Haneke early last year with his much-debated 2006 French-language feature
Cache ("Hidden"), which is still generating conversation at many a dinner table, thanks to its second life on DVD (and thanks to an increasing number of foreign film lovers who have permanently foregone a trip to the movie theater in favor of passively waiting to update their Netflix queue --
shame on you people!).That film was thought-provoking and challenging in the way it implicated you, the audience -- you know, the guy who just plopped down $10 to be 'entertained' -- in this upper class couple's voyeuristic nightmare. Just who the culprit was in this scheme to destroy this man's unexamined life is endlessly debatable.
My first foray into this Austrian director's
ouevre was 2001's excellent
The Piano Teacher starring the wondrous
Isabelle Huppert at her depraved and debased best.
Nobody does debasement better than Isabelle! (The European title,
"La Pianiste" may have lead to confusion with Roman Polanski's contemporaneous
"The Pianist." Both films stand on their own as exceptional works of art.)
Haneke's latest -- Funny Games -- a shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 Austrian feature of the same name, and his first effort in English -- does not so much provoke conversation as it provokes violent reactions from film critics. Just listen to these blurbs: "soul-grinding;" "ponderous nihilism;" "a grueling ethics exam;" "a perverse kind of cinematic sadism;" and "a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality." (If that's not a Thumbs-Up, I don't know what is!!)
As a committed fan of the lovely Naomi Watts, I feel an added discomfort witnessing the physical and emotional violence she (her character) is subjected to in this movie (even though, as executive producer, she has no one to blame but herself!). As brave and unrelenting as is her performance, this is not an actor's movie: her performance is subsumed by the director's mission: which is to browbeat the audience into admitting its culpability in today's culture of violence.
Isn't she pretty?
The movie intentionally offers no succor to the audience for witnessing this unrelenting violence--no justice, no vengeance, no tidy resolution that moviegoers come to expect--even demand--from their filmed entertainment. Haneke's point is precisely that: this is not entertainment, it should not be entertainment, and their is no redeeming social value to its depiction on screen. At its best it harkens to A Clockwork Orange in its amoral, unrelenting depiction of violence. At its worst, you want to say, "Okay, I get the point: shame on us for expecting to be 'entertained' by this. Now, what else do you have to say?"
Funny Games works more as a polemic than it does a movie. In other words, you can sit back and think "I understand the point he is trying to make" but you still have to sit through a very uncomfortable 110 minutes of movie. Not that the violence is any more 'gratuitous' than any other depictions of violence we have come to expect from our movies. But one questions the effectiveness of his diatribe if, as in my screening, the people he is trying to reach have walked out at precisely the moment he begins to make it extremely uncomfortable for the audience. [For those of you in the know, my reference is to the 'cat in the bag' game.] So for the rest of the movie, Haneke is preaching to the converted: i.e., those adventurous movie-goers who want to be challenged, provoked, but not necessarily 'entertained.'
Two effects he uses to drive home his point: 1) he never actually shows the violence that is committed in this film; and 2) he deliberately denies the audience any cathartic release one expects from a piece of entertainment: no vindication, no justice, no release from the violence you have just witnessed. Much is made of Haneke's "breaking the fourth wall" (four times by my count). Even more shocking than that, but less-discussed, is his breaking the taboo of depicting violence against children. That is what turns most people against this movie.
Don't confuse Haneke's movie with those films that spend 90 minutes wading in the excesses of violence-as-entertainment, then tacks on a morally-superior "Shame on you for enjoying this" message at the end. [The most-recent example of this: 2007's The Kingdom.] Other critics have gone so so far as to mistakenly lump it into the category of "high-toned torture porn with an edge of self-righteousness." This is not even in the same universe as the pornography of movies like Hostel, David Edelstein (you idiot!)! Even if you detest his movie, Haneke is not a 'fraud' (A.O. Scott).
The last film I remember being this uncomfortable to sit through was the disturbing-to-the-point-of (almost)-unwatchable rape scene in French enfant terrible Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2003). Is an unwatchable film worth watching? Absolutely. Irreversible made my "Top Five Foreign Films" list that year (with a strong caveat to my more sensitive readers).
[Sidebar: FFG still does not have the guts to sit through the ultimate expression of this genre -- the pinnacle of the unwatchable film: Italian master Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious
"Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom" (which, the last time I remember it being shown publicly, the manager of the Dobie Theater in Austin was threatened with child pornography charges! And this was in liberal AUSTIN!!).]
A film with the guts to force its audience to face the unfaceable -- that base instinct that draws us to hear every salacious detail of the latest rape-torture-murder victim on cable news -- the same instinct Hollywood has relied on to make hits of 'Death Wish' to 'The Brave One' to the various incarnations of Hannibal Lechter, not to mention every slasher film churned out by Hollywood since Roger Corman first picked up a camera.
Does that make "Funny Games an enjoyable experience? Not in the least. (Nor is it supposed to be). Does it make it a worthy counter-point to the dominant culture's (i.e., America's) obsession with violence-as-entertainment? Absolutely.
The movie does unravel in its second half, and by its conclusion, you are painfully aware that this is the director who cannot stop remaking the hopelessly romantic (and ultimately empty) Un homme et une femme (that was 1966, Claude! Give it up!).
