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Funny Games (2007)
Director: Michael Haneke
Synopsis
For his English-language debut, master agitator Michael Haneke relocates his own 1997 thriller about a violent home invasion to Long Island.
Movie review
From Time Out Chicago
It’s once more unto the breach for Austrian director Haneke (Caché), whose shot-for-shot, English-language remake of his own Funny Games (1997) implies that an audience will pay for an insult twice; after all, that’s what they always do with a remake or a sequel. Today Haneke aims his invective directly at the American viewers he chastised in the original—which, depending on whom you ask, is either a groundbreaking dissection of screen violence or an insufferably smug exercise in directorial condescension. Haneke takes obvious pride in ringing Pavlov’s bell again. The running time is reportedly only seconds off; working with a markedly different cast, he gives his experiment a variable.
Want a synopsis? Sorry. Either version of Funny Games is best seen with as little foreknowledge as possible. Suffice it to say that both movies involve families at summer homes—here in pretty Head of the Harbor, Long Island—contending with unwanted visitors. The primary pleasure of the new version is the superbly subtle Watts, who gives the movie an emotional center that Haneke carves up with razor precision.
Funny Games remains booby-trapped with implausibilities (no land phone?), coy formal manipulation (except in a few pointed instances, violence is off-screen) and a one-size-fits-all gimmick to silence quibblers (the infamous remote-control scene). Staging another round of brutality to condemn brutality as entertainment, Haneke has never been more exacting—or hypocritical. Games fans, needless to say, will want to be hit with another golf club.
Author: Ben Kenigsberg
Time Out Chicago Issue 159: March 13–19, 2008
User reviews of this film
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- mbeckva said...
- Posted on Oct 02 2008 11:46 Brilliant? it begs the question: what is bullshit? i must say, it was this pedantic film. so glad he took the time to remake it to slap us all on the hineys. bad viewer, bad!
- Report as inappropriate
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- Pronoy said...
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Posted on Mar 20 2008 13:14
Criticizing plot elements, flaws in structural consistency and inherent implausibilities seem a futile exercise when the film, by nature, regards such elements as irreplaceable. Funny Games is a reflection on the nature of film itself, disregarding conventional preconceived notions of what the established medium should entail. The absurdity of the event and its subsequent disregard of conventional ethics, implausibilities, and lack of collateral influence within the limited setting itself force the viewer to reflect on the medium, not riddle with the plot. It begs the question: what is film? It posits a story, one that audiences relate to, as a symbolic representation of reality. Haneke challenges that very trust, the assumption that the relationship between the viewer and a film is one of pure observance, viewing a story and judging its "purpose" based on its visual representation. Yet, from the onset Funny Games challenges the viewer's relationship to the film. It places the viewer within the context of the plot itself, while simultaneously weaving a narrative freckled with absurdity, one that the viewer realizes only through his discomfort. Haneke presents a story that would make even the most liberal of viewers squint, while placing no significance to its actual sequence of events, creating an alternate reality where the very laws of chronological progression break down. You are left with nothing other than a sequence of events, an eyepiece into an event, and yet realize the absurdity of its relation. The murders, the violence, they hold no significance, because the event itself is wrought in absurdity.
It's hard to say I enjoyed the film, because I hesitate to place it within film itself, but certainly Haneke's exercise in reflexivity posited the film as merely a statement: If film is just another medium to express an idea or a story, then where are the guidlines I must follow? Why don't I just challenge the very nature of film itself?
Funny Games, I must say, is truly a film, for it in it of itself realizes itself as a film. Brilliant. - Report as inappropriate
Cast & crew
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, Devon Gearhart, Siobhan Fallon full cast
Genre(s): Horror
Rated: R
Duration: 112 mins
US Release: Mar 14 2008
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