Park City Dispatch. 4. Funny Games.

After years of hearing recommendations for and warnings against it, I finally mustered up the courage to see Michael Haneke's 1997 Funny Games last week at San Francisco's Berlin & Beyond Film Festival, where it played as part of a posthumous tribute to actor Ulrich Mühe. I watched it knowing I'd soon have a chance to compare the experience against seeing Haneke's new English-language remake here at Sundance.

Reports that this version would be essentially identical intrigued me further. I couldn't help but start crafting a review of v.2.0 in my head even while v.1.0 was still running on the Castro Theatre screen in front of me. Something about the way reading subtitles can add an extra level of remove from the experience of watching a film, and how Anglophone viewers will no longer be allowed to read Funny Games as a specific critique of German-speaking society. (If indeed they ever did.)

All that might be true, but upon attending the US premiere of the 2007 Funny Games in Salt Lake City midnight on Saturday, I'm more interested in discussing what occurred to me at that screening than my anticipatory thoughts. I guess a plot summary might be nice too, but I'll be quick about it: a bourgeois family's vacation home is invaded by a pair of calmly homicidal preppies, who physically and psychologically torture them with a series of arbitrary "games" for the audience's "amusement."

First question: how faithful is this remake? The term "shot-for-shot" has been bandied about a lot, and that seems accurate enough. Of course the cast is different, and a few props and locations have changed character accordingly, but the musical selections, the color scheme, the geography of the three rooms in which the majority of action takes place, and even a great many of the camera set-ups, are all identical. The dialogue was tweaked very little in the translation process, other than a few remarks about cellphones and one "joke" missing from the 90-minute mark. Directors from the Lumiere Brothers to Alfred Hitchcock to Trent Harris have remade their own films for various reasons, but this is the closest copy I've seen.

Being so similar, what's it like to watch for someone who's seen the original and knows what's coming? For me, it was just as emotionally wrenching, if not more so. Foreknowledge of plot points made the on- and off-screen violence feel all the more inevitable, and difficult to sit through. Without subtitles, I didn't have to keep my eyes fixed on the bottom of the screen as much, and could pay more attention to the details of performance found in the characters' faces and line readings. That said, I sometimes noticed myself looking looking at a "neutral" corner of the screen space, as relief from the misery on display in another section of the camera image.

The casting of Tim Roth in Mühe's role as the emasculated father does diminish some of the innocence found in that character, at least for those of us who've seen Roth play villains and hoodlums. His performance is adequate to the material, as are those of Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as the tormentors. But, not to diminish what Susanne Lothar achieved as the mother in the 1997 Funny Games, Naomi Watts in that role changes at least one of the "rules of the games" for the remake. Specifically, her star stature is bound to make the audience feel more complicit in the moment when the physical violence turns into sexual humiliation and threat of rape. This is the scene that provoked the most walk-outs each time.

After sitting through this film essentially twice in little over a week, I can't help but think that the people who walk out in the middle are the sane, well-adjusted ones. That the rest of us are, at worst, just the kinds of casual sadists Haneke seems to be accusing us of being. Or at best, addicted to narrative to the degree that we can't turn away when we sense resolution, any kind of resolution, around the corner. Perhaps it's just the peak-bagger's instinct to check an unpleasant film off of our "life list." Having now climbed Mount Funny Games from two different faces, I'm here to tell you that the view from the top is just about the same. Maybe that'll save you a trip.

- Brian Darr

Reviewing Funny Games US, as it's being referred to now, for Screen Daily, Ed Lawrenson finds it "retains the emotional intensity, visceral impact and gripping hold of the original.... With cinema's shock value arguably greater than 10 years ago - through the emergence of arthouse provocateurs like Miike Takeshi and Gasper Noe and the development of mini-genres like the torture porn of Hostel in mainstream horror - there was a danger that the impact of the new Funny Games would be diminished. In fact, with the exception of a memorable moment of cathartic bloodletting (tellingly a fantasy scene) the violence is all off screen. It is through the emotional consequences of Paul and Peter's actions that the film makes its exacting demands on viewers."

Update, 1/22: Haneke "isn't torturing the family and the audience for the sake of torture, but for the sake of showing us how preposterous it is to assume that such films are accepted under the guise of entertainment, and every single aspect of the film exists to support this commentary," argues Jim Rohner at Zoom In Online. "Many can argue that the Saws and the Hostels carry their own social commentaries, but Haneke has shown how a skilled filmmaker can craft the macabre, how to use the torture for his own devices and has produced a film not to be missed."

Updates, 1/25: "To be honest, I've never felt too sure what to make of Funny Games in the first place, or whether Haneke's comments about it were entirely straightforward," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir:

Add to that the puzzling question of why he chose to remake it in English, 10 years later, and the conclusion I reach after a great deal of high-powered cogitation is this: He's fucking with us.

Because Haneke professes left-wing political views, some critics react to his films as if they all encoded crude Marxist dogma: The creepy videotapes sent to the family household in Caché express the French nation's guilt over colonialism; the sadistic invaders in Funny Games represent the true price of the middle-class family's soulless affluence, etc. Maybe those aren't totally wrongheaded interpretations, but they're no better than partial and reductive ones. Haneke's central concerns, I believe, are more formal and symbolic and ironic than they are narrowly political.

"It's hard to say which Funny Games stirs up more - your guts, or your brain," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "It gives you what you want and asks why you want it in the first place, and it does both those things superbly. It is cruel, cold and darkly thrilling."

Update, 1/26: "At its heart, Funny Games was always an act of intellectual terror, the story of a culture (and a cinema) reaping what it sowed," writes Tom Hall. "But in a post-9/11 world, in a nation whose daily obsession with the sensationalist press constantly keeps the most grotesque and cruel acts front and center in our minds, acts for which we as a nation harbor so much responsibility, well, at this point, Haneke seems to be piling on."

Update, 1/27: Online listening tips. James Rocchi talks with Corbet and Pitt for Cinematical.

Update, 1/31: "Haneke's exercise might seem even more fruitless (and more bananas) than Gus Van Sant's Psycho, but for those who've seen the original, the remake - known for convenience's sake as Funny Games US - is a fascinating endeavor," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. " Within the otherwise identical frames, the differences pop out like the variables in a scientific experiment."

Posted by dwhudson at January 21, 2008 5:46 AM