Funny Games (Michael Haneke) 1998
Alternately
infuriating and harrowing, Michael Haneke’s Funny
Games is a potent piece of shock cinema that thrives on making the audience
uncomfortable. Outwardly a Hitchcockian slow boil this genre piece, which deftly
evades falling into the traps of its generic trappings, is infused with a sense
of self-awareness that underscores the inherent bloodlust that the audience
feels when watching a sadistic thriller. Surely, most audience members will be
aware before they watch this film of the moral implications of getting
enjoyment, or rather excitement, out of feigned human suffering, but there’s
something that’s terribly persuasive in Haneke’s visceral and formalistic
presentation.
Funny
Games works far better when
you look at its technique than when you examine its somewhat obvious message,
though it’s hardly a film without ideas. Certainly its willingness to provide
easy, but wholly unsatisfying, answers and motivations for its antagonists makes
apparent to the audience our need to justify to ourselves the horrors that are
presented on screen in most exploitation films. The way that this sermonizing is
presented though is what makes it bearable. Eschewing didactic moralizing,
Haneke puts his reprimands in the mouths of an attractive pair of flip
troublemakers. They casually go about their nasty business, quite boldly telling
the audience that they do what they do for us. The suffering doesn’t stop
because we’re willing to keep watching.
Surely, the
description of the film makes it sound horribly sadistic, and I suppose that it
is to a degree. Still, the film allows a rare chance for the audience to
actively examine their own reactions to the film, and could prompt plenty of
discussion about why we feel what we feel in spite of ourselves. Perhaps, the
argument could be made that Haneke is trying to be reductionist here. Both his
distillations of the scope of human experience into the most extreme actions and
emotions and his compression of cinematic technique to the point where anyone
who watches will feel pretty much the same feelings at the same time could
easily rankle. Those might be misguided complaints, however, because this sort
of scolding requires a strong hand. Since films as easy to read as Trainspotting
are wildly misinterpreted by masses of people, you can barely fault the director
for writing his thesis in bold letters. Admittedly, there are a few films that
provoke the same sort of self-reflection about the film-watching process, by
such directors as Kiarostami and Godard, that don’t trudge so much in the gory
details as Haneke’s movie, but he earns the comparison to those masters here.
All of
Haneke’s games would be pointless if the film that he used to toss around his
ideas in wasn’t as gripping as the best of Hitchcock. This is required so that
we can understand the appeal to this sort of moviemaking in the first place.
Luckily, Haneke’s film keeps you completely involved emotionally from moment
to excruciating moment. The difference between Funny
Games and less “responsible” filmmaking is that when the play escalates
beyond breaking social mores and becomes dead serious, the director stops the
film to allow a legitimate, traumatic period of mourning, making us powerfully
aware of the stakes of his games and our part in them.
****
01-15-02
Jeremy Heilman
