“Funny Games” is an aggressively tortuous film ostensibly about torture, but more accurately a calculating, metatextual comment on violence. It’s not necessarily fun to watch, but it’s fun to write about and you can expect lots of movie outlets to give this film a lot of ink (including us).
It’s also perversely a shot-by-shot remake of a tortuous film ostensibly about torture, but more accurately a calculating, metatextual comment on violence. No really, a punishing shot-for-fucking-shot and excruciating exercise, tweaked with name brand recognizable actors (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt).
What is it actually about? Simple: two psychotic boys who take a family hostage and terrorize them…for kicks.
Directed by psychological trickster, deviant and very Austrian (read: Germanic, not to mention Owl-like) Michael Haneke, ‘Games’ is well, is just that. A twisted play about violence, entertainment, voyeurism and your complicity delivered in a winky-winky, manipulative fuck you. Doubly twisted cause he already made the exact same film in 1997 with Austrian/German actors.
Without giving away the way some of it is presented, it’s purposely manipulative. “I couldn’t believe how [Haneke] played with us as an audience and tricked us, and commented on his trickery the whole time,” Naomi Watts told the A/V Club about the original film. Yes, active commentary.
Somehow it wasn’t as quite as tortuous to work on as we would have thought according (though Watts might just being diplomatic; but to be fair, she does seem to genuinely love and admire her director)
“It was a very tense subject, and it made for a tense feeling on the set. We were all affected by what we were doing. At times, we were having to get off the set for a while just to break away from it. And other times, we would just stay right there, crack some ridiculous jokes, and work our way through it. Fortunately, Tim Roth as a fantastic sense of humor.”
Haneke has that Germanic way of coldly intellectualizing brutality that makes you think he clubs baby seals for purely scientific purposes.
“Violence in my films is shown as it really is. The suffering of a victim. The viewer comes to see what it means to act violently — that’s why the films are often experienced as painful,” Haneke told the NY Times in the summer of last year in a piece in which they accurately dubbed him the “Minister of Fear”; “painful,” generally be an massive understatement when it comes to his films.
I think it was always Michael’s intention to get under the skin of the audience,” Watts said. “He says, very matter-of-factly, ‘This is hard work. I dare you to go there.’
He’ll surely be daring audiences to go there too. While this is not our review (oh no, we have waaay more to say), it’s surely a difficult film to watch on multiple levels and moreso if you’ve seen the original. It’s kind of like a headgame x10.
So why a shot for shot remake? The same exact film only with different actors? “Because the German-language version did not find the English-language audience for which the film was originally meant,” the director tersely told Entertainment Weekly.
Oh and note. Pretty much every second of violence in the film is not actually shown on screen. Why? (other than the fact it’s somehow 1,000 times more impactful and disturbing) “I don’t really want to be part of this violence pornography of the mass media,” Haneke said. Duuuuuh, oh right.
There are surely eggheaded media studies students that are going to argue that this film is actually a comedy and while there are surely elements of twisted humor in it, no, they would incorrect (let’s not have this argument, seriously).
As EW astutely points out, it’s a heavy irony ‘Games’ films act as polemics against violence, yet both films are/will be known for being wildly violent. Ah, therein lies the rub Haneke says, “It’s s a violent film because it doesn’t allow you to consummate the violence. In an action film, violence is depicted in such a way that it doesn’t hurt the audience… [they] feel good about it… it’s a rollercoaster — a thrill. In my films what I’m trying to do is depict violence in such a way that it becomes reality again for the audience.”
This we really wouldn’t argue.
There’s not a lot of music in the film really, but the naturally, the exact same pieces of music are used in the exact same spots; including two mocking uses of jazz noisenik John Zorn/Naked City spastic noise freakouts “Bonehead” and “Hellraiser.”
Listen: Naked City – “Bonehead”
Watch: “Funny Games” trailer