Watching Funny Games is pure torture. It’s not that the film is bad, mind you. Far from it. Funny Games is a work of unmitigated genius. But it is, most certainly, not for the faint of heart. Deliberately intended to disturb and provoke its audience, Funny Games works so well that it is, at times, nearly unwatchable.
In this incendiary and brutal thriller, an affluent, upper-crust family composed of father George (Tim Roth), mother Anna (Naomi Watts) and son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) arrive at their picturesque lakeside vacation home somewhere in New England for a few weeks of rest and relaxation.
When Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), awkward yet unfailingly polite young men dressed in tennis whites, stop by claiming to be friends of the neighbors in need of a few eggs, George and Anna think nothing of it. And why should they? The boys’ manners and social etiquette are impeccable. They are genuine and sincere to all outward appearances.
But something is off. The boys won’t leave and the longer they stay, the more non sequitur their behavior and language becomes. The scene is troubling specifically because neither the family nor the audience can put their finger on what’s so unsettling. Without context, the boys’ actions seem completely innocuous. And yet, the sequence builds to almost unbearable tension. Only gradually do we realize that Paul and Peter are actually devils with cherub’s faces. (Ironically, theirs is the sort of sadistic role we’re used to seeing Roth play). When their intrusiveness gives way to a terrifying home invasion, their earlier words and actions suddenly take on a sheen of malevolent foreboding. Paul and Peter go about setting up a sadistic series of childish games, culminating in a bet that, by morning, every member of the family will be dead.
Funny Games is a savage commentary on the use of violence in entertainment. It exists as both a violent movie and a movie about violence, taking a disturbing look at how depictions of barbarism reflect and shape our culture. Filmmaker Michael Haneke has been here before, not only in his superb Cache, which also examines violence and voyeurism, but also in his controversial 1997, Austrian movie by the same name on which this film is patterned. Haneke hasn’t simply remade the earlier Funny Games — he’s duplicated it almost shot for shot, set for set, word for word.
Funny Games can be agonizingly — and intentionally — slow. It subjects the audience to long, antiseptic observations of the characters’ agony. Instead of the kinetic editing usually associated with thrillers of this nature, Haneke shoots in long, unbroken takes, distancing the audience from the action and denying us the close-ups we have come to expect. The simple cinematography, indicative of much of European filmmaking, builds the tension until you feel you simply cannot watch any longer. Haneke has built blindingly white sets (all the better to show blood, my dear) and weaved aural soundscapes of jarring dissonance. Everything in this film is meant to make us uncomfortable.
Funny Games constantly blurs the line between reality and fiction, frequently breaking what, in cinema studies, is referred to as the “fourth wall” — that imaginary, invisible partition separating the audience from the action without which the illusion of theater and film would not work. Put simply, a character is said to break the fourth wall when he or she shows their awareness of the audience. As such actions jarringly call attention to the fantasy, filmmakers almost never do it, obviously preferring the audience to lose themselves in the fiction as if they were observing real events.
But callously shattering that illusion is exactly what Haneke wants to do. Throughout the film, the character of Paul turns and addresses the camera. No other character has this power, nor do they seem to notice that Paul has it. When Paul asks his hostages to bet on the odds of their survival, he turns to the camera, smirks, and asks us if we’d like to bet as well. “You’re on their side, aren’t you?” he asks.
Haneke takes it one step further. Not only is Paul aware of the audience’s gaze, he is also conscious of the conventions of narrative plot devices, discussing “realistic endings” and “plausible plot developments.” Mindful of the audience’s expectation that those formulas be followed, Paul thwarts them at every turn, deliberately avoiding the payoffs we demand. When the plot takes a turn Paul disapproves of, he actually shows himself to have god-like powers to rework the narrative in his image.
Paul is fully sentient of the fact that he is a character in a movie. But, he argues, that doesn’t make him any less real. It is on this admission that the entire film turns. Mixing Brecht and Pirandello, Haneke argues that a fiction observed is just as real as anything else and violence on screen is every bit as deplorable and degrading as if it were occurring in real life.
Unlike the appalling Untraceable, which pretended to preach a similar message yet reveled in showing its characters die in gory, gruesome detail, Haneke believes in his conceit enough to put his cinematic money where his philosophical mouth is. All the instances of violence in Funny Games, large and small (minus one), take place off screen. We see the aftermath, but never the brutality itself. Likewise, when Paul and Peter demand Anna strip naked for them, we are never allowed to see what they see. While it is no great conjecture that a large number in the audience would love a carnal glimpse of the beautiful Miss Watts, Haneke turns the moment into an indictment of audience expectation and desire.
Funny Games is not contemptuous of its audience, intent on turning off or irritating viewers like so many other films of its ilk seem to be. Rather, it hopes you are eventually in on the sadistic joke and leave the theater feeling the burning condemnation and weighty gravity of your sins pressing down upon you.
“Why don’t you just kill us?” Anna begs at one point in the film.
“You shouldn’t forget the value of entertainment,” is the reply.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
