Funny Games

The arrival of Michael Haneke's English-language remake of his baldly provocative 1997 film, Funny Games, is like the reboot of a computer that downloads all sorts of (cultural) software. The program titles might run from "Why Re-Do Exactly What's Already Been Done?" to "The Moral Responsibility of the American Moviegoer in the New Century," leading on to fun ones like "The Chasm Between the Film Critic and the Filmgoer." Precisely because Haneke conceived of his original and his nearly exact duplicate not as genre movies but as critiques of genre, and as polemical vessels for a nest of issues rather than as what he's termed a "consumable" entertainment, the new film is best addressed not in terms of whether it actually works on screen, but as an object that spews out ideas—and in terms of whether the ideas convince. This use of a film as topic-machine rather than as a drama or a slasher movie remains as controversial and dubious in the view of some critics now (see Derek Elley's Variety review from the 2007 London Film Festival) as it was when the original Austrian Funny Games premiered to a violently split crowd in Cannes, and it suggests that much of the forthcoming critical response—especially among the clusters of North American critics who've never seen the original, and perhaps know Haneke only previously from Caché —will repeat a similar complaint: A violent horror-thriller about two young effete killers systematically torturing and killing a family must first provide catharsis, and then, only secondarily (if at all), address moral and cultural issues.

As in the old Funny Games, the remake centers on the happy family of Anna (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth), and their young son Georgie (Devon Gearhart), vacationing at their lakeside summer home, when two young men, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet)—whose only outward sign of suspicion is that they're wearing white cotton gloves—are introduced to them by neighbors. From here, the two men deploy a seemingly innocent ruse to enter the home and proceed to slowly terrorize the family. Originally conceived as an American horror show which Haneke, for practical reasons, had to set in Austria, the new version brings things back home as it were, exactly replicating the 1997 version, down to the physical layout of the house, the color schemes, props, and even the various day and nighttime light tones in exterior shots. Among other things, this proves for certain that—whether he uses the great cinematographer Jurgen Jurges (for the 1997 version) or the great Darius Khondji (for the new film)—Haneke is fundamentally his own cinematographer exercising considerable control over the entire look of his films.

Much had been made, in 1997, of Haneke's deliberately upturning the notion of what genre is supposed to do. By forcing audiences through cleverly surreptitious devices and shock moments to confront their own implicit bloodlust and manipulated desire for revenge against evil depicted on screen, he was effectively putting on trial a whole corral of movies that use violence to titillate and emotionally cleanse. But what was at least as important was Haneke's interest in alienating the audience against the movie itself and in foregrounding issues inside the Trojan Horse of thriller conventions. This was by far the most "Germanic" aspect of Funny Games—the Brechtian tradition of commenting on the drama itself, the direct confrontation with the audience by characters—not in a Shakespearean aside as a third party overhearing the conversation or as a friend being confessed to, but as an outside party who may either want to join in on the mayhem or, as a potential opponent, who must be convinced. When Paul, the brains of the pair, looks back to the audience with a wink in one scene or with a question in another ("You're on their side, aren't you?"), Brecht's alienation effect is in full force, alternating between collusion and confrontation.

Anna (Naomi Watts), as the terrorized wife with Peter

It's also worth noting in this regard that the original Funny Games was read differently based on critics' national/cultural origins. Many European and English-language critics expressed mild forms of outrage along with admiration, but generally set their criticism against the backdrop of the American slasher movie that the film was subverting. Almost alone, Austrian critics (with their easy access to the Austro-German genre), cited the attempts of Funny Games to undermine the "heimat" film and its extolling of home-based bourgeois values. Although this is certainly valid, and brings up a theme of the paradoxes of critical response I'll discuss later, it does not lessen Haneke's primary mission from the start against the American brand of exploitation—and the moral matter of the human consequences of violence inflicted by one character (good or evil) on another. And because of this, it works to answer the hypothetical question, "Why Re-Do It?" Haneke all along imagined and intended Funny Games as an American-produced film set in America involving American characters. Funny Games U.S. is, then in fact, the film that Haneke had ideally and initially devised.

The moral challenges that both films pose remain the same, while the context and purposes have changed. Given the films he made after 1997, I had presumed that Haneke had privately determined that he had failed with the original Funny Games—that he concluded his techniques for forcing the audience out of their comfort zones to examine their roles as consumers and, even more radically, his techniques for opening up the possibility that audiences could collude with the killers, were simply beyond the pale. (The film's most notorious example of this is the much-discussed scene when Anna, the mother, shoots Paul's partner Peter with a rifle, followed by Paul's frantically finding the TV remote control to rewind the scene in order to make things go his way—thus tripping up an audience who had found themselves rooting for a murder.) It seemed reasonable to assume that the wide-ranging survey of European disquiet represented by Code Unknown and the observation of human beings surviving in the wake of civilization's collapse in Time of the Wolf were two means for Haneke to get beyond the facile gamesmanship of his previous cause célèbre. I had also perhaps been engaging in my own game, which was to project my extreme disappointment with the 1997 film as pushing things so far as to invite the audience to join in on the murdering itself—that Haneke's original purpose was so undone in the thrill of the act of moviemaking that Paul's contact with the viewer was more than that—it had become an alliance, capped by a closing shot that seemed to seal a complicity between viewers and the Paul-Peter team. But for Haneke to actually revisit Funny Games—and not just revisit, but remake it down to a virtual duplicate shot for shot—indicated that this assumption, this projection, was wrong, and that something else was going on. And it was this: Funny Games from its title on, had to be in English.

It can't be overstated that the effect of hearing what is essentially the same film over again (that reboot effect), now, in one's native language utterly transforms the experience of the film itself. This goes far beyond a possibly greater emotional identification with stars like Watts (whose Anna is more sexualized this time) and Roth (whose George is more emotionally vulnerable than Ulrich Muhe's characterization in the original), or a familiarity with past dark performances by Pitt, who has a peculiar gift for sliding inside the minds of nefarious young men with outsized and disturbed intellects. While a non-German listener could at least detect the unctuous irony in the voice of Arno Frisch (who played Paul in the original), there's an entirely greater, more chilling and infinitely funnier impact for the English ear when hearing the same lines delivered by Pitt, or for that matter by Corbet as Peter, who will always be remembered for his disarming explanation of the torture "games" themselves to Anna, George, and Georgie: "You shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment." For a film designed primarily as a visual analysis of how the urges for violence are shared by characters and audiences alike—and as a rebuke to the audience for not recognizing this point—the impact of words in the new Funny Games is unexpectedly overwhelming and creates a manifestly American filter through which all else flows.

Of course, this is felt only by those who've seen the original, which leaves out the vast majority of the new film's viewers; there's been a boomlet for the original in North America among those who've caught up with the film on DVD, either in Koch Lorber's release or in Kino's subsequent repackaging, which includes a Haneke interview with critic Serge Toubiana. There's no doubt that this helped convince Warner Independent Pictures (along with producing partner Celluloid Dreams) to finance the remake, a business decision exactly along the lines of other Hollywood remakes of recent Asian extreme home-video hits like The Ring (which, in a case of trivia and coincidence gone wild, featured Naomi Watts as star in an English-language redo by the original's director). Put aside this small audience sliver, and the transformational linguistic effect of the new Funny Games will be lost on almost all who now see it.

Devon Gearhart as the couple's son

This leads to some new speculations, and new concerns. Since Funny Games has been restored to its originally intended form in English and in an American setting (Long Island, to be precise)—a form to match its action and ideas—it begs the general question regarding what's missed in the translation when an English-language critic listens to a non-English language film (assuming, for these purposes, that the critic is a dummy in the other language).

Is it possible that critics, and audiences, can be fooled by films not in their native language? Naturally, this applies across all languages, but the framework for the issue is always going to be subjectively based in one's own tongue. Taken a step further, there's the even more subjective effect of how a foreign language sounds to one's ear; while some friends and acquaintances hate the sound of German, for instance, and thus will always have a core problem cozying up to any German film, others adore the language's aural textures and music. It may even be possible that some English-speaking fans of the Austrian Funny Games may feel that the new version is missing some edge, especially with Pitt's English, since they may associate German with evil Nazis and how the language has long been satirized in (especially) the U.S.

But another concern with the new Funny Games (which Haneke originally wanted to title Funny Games U.S.—the title that was on the high-definition video print I saw last September) has nothing to do with linguistics. Haneke discusses whether, at the end of his video interview with Toubiana, the unexpected popularity of the original Funny Games on DVD might mean that the film is becoming, perversely, too popular; or at least, more popular than Haneke ever wished a critique of consumerism would be. Is Funny Games, he wonders, becoming just another consumer entertainment? Is it destined to be viewed as just another Naomi Watts chiller? Has Warner Independent guaranteed this with its ad poster featuring Watts's big head, with the obvious device of appealing to Ring fans? Is the trailer—viewable all over the Web—a kind of con job, since it's nothing more than your basic teaser for a slasher-thriller? Precisely by remaking his film in America, with an American studio indie division, has Haneke unavoidably played right into the studio's game of peddling consumer products? And with all of this in play, as the film is framed and marketed for the North American public, are the expectations and sets of responses to Funny Games certain to widen the gap between the manner in which audiences and critics see movies in general, with Haneke's film as a prime example?

All of this and more is not only possible, but certain. The arguably courageous attempt by Haneke to effectively smuggle his polemical work of antigenre into the commercial mainstream of American movies is almost certain to be undone by the very forces he has openly despised, and perhaps no amount of critical explication will reverse it since the movie—by its position inside a genre that it nevertheless wants to subvert—is being sold as something that it's not. Apart from the sheer merits of the film—and they are considerable, not only in the ways in which Haneke has brilliantly succeeded in reframing his original work, but in the manner in which his control of the medium has reached awesome heights—that control ends once the film is flung out into the marketplace, where the new Funny Games will doubtless be gobbled up and spat out. And Haneke should probably have seen this coming. As the film's ad line says: "You must admit, you brought this on yourself."

Robert Koehler writes film criticism for Variety and Cinema Scope.

To buy the original Funny Games click here