Dead again

>> Austrian director Michael Haneke on
America, onscreen violence and his dark
and brutal remake Funny Games

by MATTHEW HAYS

I confess to feeling at a distinct disadvantage when I ventured to a press screening of Funny Games on another snowy morning last week. Why disadvantaged? I knew what was coming.

I’d already caught the 1997 original, a scorching, brutal depiction of feral violence captured in despairing realism by Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Made with the same English title, Haneke revealed at the time that he had originally envisioned making the film in America, as Funny Games was intended to lambaste American audiences for their bottomless enthusiasm for consuming huge quantities of onscreen violence. Alas, at the time he didn’t have the reputation to scare up the budget needed, so he made it on his home turf, in German.

The original set off a firestorm in the European press, after Haneke introduced the film at its Cannes premiere and declared it “an anti-Tarantino film.” Some saw it as a clever indictment of a culture soaked in excessive gore, while others accused Haneke of revelling in the very violence he was purporting to disdain.

Cut to 11 years later, and Haneke is now an internationally renowned auteur, especially after his Cannes-award-winning Caché, regarded by many as the best film of 2005. His new name recognition led one American producer, Chris Coen, to suggest that Haneke remake the film as he’d originally intended, in English.

It’s difficult to describe the intensity of the result, which stars the familiar faces of Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt. And in basic synopsis, one might mistake the Funny Games remake (or Funny Games U.S., as Haneke originally wanted to call it) as a simple film.

The opening credits introduce us to the protagonist family, Watts, Roth and their sweet, seven-year-old son, as they drive towards their lakefront vacation retreat. The picture of normalcy, things soon unravel once they get there. As Dad tends to the sailboat out back, two strangers (Pitt and Brady Corbet) arrive at the back door, asking to borrow some eggs. Watts gives them to Pitt, and he immediately drops them, apologizing profusely for having made such a grave mess of things. She begins to get creeped out, and ultimately asks them both to leave. By then, it’s too late: Roth arrives to get his knee cracked by a golf club; the family is dragged into the living room, where they are tortured for much of the rest of the movie.

FIRST OFFENDERS: The original Funny Games

Genre defiant

Nothing is sacred. Haneke has his villains make a bet with their victims: you’re all dead by 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. But the brilliance of Funny Games is precisely what it’s not doing. Haneke is keenly aware that the salivating movie-going masses have been conditioned to get off on a certain formula for violence. He goes in the opposite, unexpected direction, making us identify with the family and offering utterly no emotional catharsis. When he does hold up the prospect of revenge, he cruelly retracts the offer, just as we’ve tasted what lesser filmmakers would have satisfied us with. Funny Games is quite simply the most disturbing film I’ve ever sat through. It is abrasive, cruel, dark, appalling, excessive, nightmarish and horrific. In other words, it’s the perfect movie for our times.

For a director who’s just doled out second helpings of serious mindfuck, Haneke, 65, laughs a lot on the other end of the line. From a New York hotel room, he ponders how freakishly prescient the original was, and how fitting the remake seems now, some 11 years later. Since the first, of course, there were the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the invasion of a country that had no connection to those attacks over fictional weapons of mass destruction, and a new round of cultural reaction, in the form of torture porn. “Yes, this film is definitely more up-to-date than ever,” Haneke tells me. “It has come far closer to reality now.”

With Funny Games, Haneke joins a unique club of filmmakers who have remade their own films, among them Hitchcock and William Wyler. Critics have generally suggested that this is virtually the same film, but there are nuances between the two: the family dog, a mean German Shepherd in the original, has been supplanted by a kinder, gentler breed, a Golden Retriever. And the shifts in human casting are noteworthy. The vulnerable woman has a more sexual aura about her now that she’s played by Watts. “I thought she was amazing in Mulholland Drive,” Haneke reports. “It was one of the conditions of making the movie that she star. Roth was cast through the usual channels. He often plays the bad guy in movies, so it was a switch to have him play the victim.”

And the bad guys have also been transformed. While both wear clinical white gloves, the original duo had jet-black short hair, leading many North American audiences to see them as neo-Naziesque. “This was a mistake in the reading,” Haneke corrects. “When North Americans see violent people who speak German onscreen they think of Nazis.” The new villains are decidedly more effete and sport blonde mops, though they’re every bit as grotesquely manipulative. They joke about being gay (though Haneke says they’re not intended to be), and appear to have no names, comically referring to each other by rotating nicknames, including Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butt-Head. Ultimately, they are parodies of generic horror or suspense movie villains—they are there to fill the role of serving up the mindless violence, generously.

Fact and friction

What is refreshing—and I’m using that word very, very loosely—about this remake is the way in which Haneke has kept his central themes intact. When Watts and Roth repeatedly ask the murderers why they are doing this, they suggest there really is no reason for it. “Why not?” Pitt asks, menacingly. In his director’s statement for the original film, Haneke pointed to what he saw as the disintegrating line between “real existence and representation.” With both films, he repeatedly asks the question: isn’t there something truly sick about a popular culture that gets off so routinely on excessive depictions of violence? He hints, not so subtly, that there is far greater connection between on- and off-screen violence than we’d like to believe.

Haneke employs the devices of playwright Bertolt Brecht, who argued that audiences should be keenly aware that they are watching artifice, not reality, as they consumed a play or a movie. Haneke works to break down the fourth wall by having Pitt directly address the camera at several key points in the film, effectively making the audience complicit in his violent acts. Pitt and Corbet talk about their problematic childhoods, sounding eerily like whiny guests on any given episode of Dr. Phil.

And if that doesn’t make Funny Games self-conscious enough, Haneke also includes a shot of a television, as the blood of a recently slaughtered victim drips down its screen. The banality of evil plays out in the living room as the banality of a pro sports match plays out on the television. Funny Games also draws attention to its form precisely for what it doesn’t reveal: in direct opposition to recent cinematic trends—in which everything is shown in full-blown detail—Haneke has most of the violence happening off-screen, leaving the horror, in Hitchcockian style, to our own worst imaginations. Haneke keeps tossing a wrench into every aspect of the movie formula, repeatedly unsettling our expectations while twisting the knife.

But all this has prompted many to ask the question: by delivering yet more cinematic violence, even while commenting on it, won’t he simply be handing the very audience he’s scolding the cheap thrills they lust after? Isn’t it entirely ironic that the very consumers he’s chastising will be consuming Funny Games, potentially with some vicarious pleasure? “You have no panacea against misunderstandings, unfortunately. I hope the alienation effect that I’m employing will work against that.”

Does Haneke have any grand theories as to why audiences are drawn to violence? “No, I wonder about that.”

And how is Haneke bracing himself for the inevitable critical onslaught, now that Funny Games is set to ignite debates across America? “I have read some of the more recent reviews. And some critics have been pretty shocked. But it would be pretty bad if they weren’t shocked, wouldn’t it?”

Funny Games opens this
Friday, March 14

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