Michael Haneke (1997)

I chickened out of Funny Games to an extent that partly invalidates my response to it.   I knew what the scenario was – a family on holiday is held captive and terrorised by two young men – but I didn’t know exactly what happened.  The family – Anna (Susanne Lothar), her husband Georg (Ulrich Mühe) and their son (Stefan Clapczysnki), also called Georg but known as Schorschi – have an Alsatian dog, Rolfi.  Because it was almost immediately obvious that Rolfi wouldn’t survive and because I can’t stand watching animals being hurt, I looked up the plot synopsis on Wikipedia to check when to be prepared for the dog to be killed by the two intruders, Peter and Paul.  Once I’d started the synopsis I read on, an act of weakness which meant that I couldn’t experience the rest of the film as Michael Haneke intended.  I don’t know how I would have coped – or not coped – with Funny Games in the cinema if I’d seen it there, especially if I hadn’t known the main events and denouement.  I don’t recall having walked out of a film because it was too much for me:  Alien sort of comes into this category but I wasn’t overcome by the situation – I was merely repelled by the physical detail of the horror.  I don’t recall either having walked out when I thought a film was interesting, which Funny Games certainly is.  I’d got it on Curzon on Demand (the free promotional offer I was given at Curzon Richmond on Good Friday) and I began to watch on my iPad.  I kept thinking this was a waste of the battery and I should switch to the desktop PC but I stayed with the iPad not only because the screen was smaller but because it allowed me a physical position, looking down at the screen, that made me feel safer.   I still couldn’t stand Funny Games in one sitting:  I watched the first forty minutes late on Sunday night and decided I would need to resume in daylight.  Funny Games has been unfinished business throughout this week but I’ve seen it through now, as self-protectively as possible.

The film begins with a crane shot overseeing a car, with a boat attached to it, travelling along a motorway; there’s opera music on the soundtrack, followed by speaking voices.  A woman asks a man to guess both the composer and the singer of successive pieces.  As the car arrives at the holiday destination, one of a group of lakeside houses, the opera singers are replaced by the thrash metal aggression of Naked City, the avant-garde band founded and led by John Zorn.  The irruption of this very different music – although it’s a simple enough indicator of how the civilised leisure of the holiday-makers will be obliterated – is viscerally powerful and upsetting.  The opera quiz is a funny game in the sense that it’s a pleasant, mildly amusing way of passing the time on what’s presumably a lengthy road journey.  This game will be succeeded by the funny games which the two young men Peter and, especially, Paul insist on playing, once they’ve got the family where they want them – imprisoned in their holiday home, with Georg disabled:  Paul thwacks a golf driver into his leg and breaks it as soon as Georg puts up physical resistance.  Paul’s and Peter’s sadistic games are funny peculiar, to put it mildly, but, to them, funny ha-ha too.  Many film-makers play games with their audience – Alfred Hitchcock was famously explicit about the fun to be had with this (‘I enjoy playing the audience like a piano’).  It’s what Michael Haneke is doing in this movie – yet he doesn’t mean the audience to be amused (even by the awareness of our being manipulated) and he’s too sternly sophisticated to be caught enjoying himself.  What he finally achieves in Funny Games is to make you aware – as Hidden and, for all its great qualities, The White Ribbon also make you aware – of his humourless omnipotence.  The opening God’s-eye view of the car hardly seems a coincidence.

Michael Haneke, as well as making cinema, writes about it.  In an essay called Film as Catharsis (published in 1992, the year his second feature Benny’s Video was released) he explains that:

‘My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its disempowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.’

In Funny Games, Haneke confounds expectations of what will happen in a screen story like this one – at least to the principal human beings (as opposed to their hapless pet).    He suggests that the believable grim situation and letting the audience off the hook by allowing the characters to escape is an uneasy and unsatisfactory combination; he replaces it with a very different one.  He shows what might be more likely to happen if two young male psychopaths wanted to murder a child, a woman and a physically weakened man – all three members of the family die.  But he also uses devices to heighten our awareness that we expect them to survive the ordeal and of our role as spectators.  He has Paul turn to camera and address the audience several times – for example, when he bets the family that none of them will be alive by nine o’clock the following morning, Paul then asks us what we think the odds are against their survival.   When Paul first winks at the camera, I thought – even though I was primed for him to break the fourth wall – he was winking at Peter.  Haneke would presumably account that a success, his point being that the viewer, as much as Peter, is Paul’s partner in crime.  The alienation effect is meant to make audiences feel there’s an unwanted but inevitable complicity between themselves and Paul but the effect, in my case anyway, was rather to underline Paul’s complicity with the writer-director – Paul is Haneke’s proxy – and to make me feel antipathy towards them both.  This is partly because Arno Frisch, who plays Paul (he also played Benny in Benny’s Video), doesn’t seduce the audience in any way.  He’s effective enough in his role in the main action but, when he momentarily steps out of it, he’s the same, evidently limited actor.  Haneke, through Paul, comments on the plotting of Funny Games more than once.  He stops short, though, of having Paul comment on his own role in the narrative style and structure of the film – a role which makes it certain that, if Haneke is going to play fair, Paul is going to come out on top.  Like his creator, Paul not only directs what happens to the others but is able to stand outside the action.

The surface affability of Paul and Frank Giering’s Peter in their first interactions with the family is so thin that it isn’t disarming:  the sleek Paul, in his white sweater, shorts and shoes, is a smiley creep and the overweight, shapeless Peter is awkwardly ingratiating – the actors stress these qualities so emphatically that both are instantly sinister.  Paul is the one in charge but Haneke doesn’t suggest any kind of relationship between the two beyond this: Paul repeatedly calls Peter ‘Fatty’ and Peter tells him not to, to no effect, and that’s about it.   Nor is there any psychological explanation for their behaviour.  At one point, Paul says they both need to steal money to buy drugs but he suggests this as if merely to show his awareness that the audience, if not his and Peter’s victims, expect to be supplied with a motive for the boys’ crimes:  they’re evidently not going to be satisfied with theft.  The lack of characterisation of Paul and Peter in the script and the insistent but shallow acting of Frisch and Giering may be meant to compound the pointlessness of their actions but, as the film progressed, these failings (as you would normally take them to be) turn your attention towards Haneke’s own psychology and motivation.

It’s when Peter shoots the boy Schorschi that Funny Games reaches the point of no return.  This should be a brutal affront to your expectations and the moral order of things in fiction and reality:  the child should be spared if anyone is – especially when he’s as brave and resourceful as Schorschi, who briefly escapes from the house, although the locked security gates are too high for him to get much further, and finds a shotgun with which he threatens Paul.   Schorschi’s death occurs offscreen:  we’re watching Paul in the kitchen, getting some food, when we hear a gunshot from the next room – the screams that follow are muffled by the blaring television there.  Haneke is, of course, well aware that this is an outrageous turn of events and of the screw on the audience:  he has Paul say that it was a dramatic miscalculation for Schorschi to be killed first since it makes it obvious that both his parents will follow.  Yet I’m not sure that Haneke, for all his knowingness, realises the full extent of the obviousness of Funny Games.  By this stage, you’ve virtually abandoned your usual expectations; your assumptions of what might happen in Hollywood have been replaced by your assumptions of what is likely to happen in continental European arthouse cinema – and, in this respect, Haneke is unsurprising.  When the camera moves into the room where the killing has taken place, it first shows an artful arrangement of thin streaks of blood on the television screen. The corpse of Schorschi is then revealed, his head in a pool of blood, at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.   Anna, crouched and stunned, is also in the shot – for what feels like minutes, she’s as motionless as her son’s body and Jürgen Jürges’s camera.   Eventually she goes over to her husband, who’s been lying on the floor out of sight, helps him to a seat and goes to the kitchen to find a knife to cut his tied hands free.  Now it’s Georg’s turn to sit stupefied and unmoving – a matching audacious shot.   It doesn’t go on as long as the previous one (although still for too long, given how little time Anna would need to be absent from the room) but it draws attention to itself in a similar way.  It’s well nigh incredible that neither parent is anxious to attend to, or at least cover, their child’s corpse; you can accept this isn’t a priority for the characters only because you realise that Haneke’s mind is on other things – constructing highly accomplished images.  Nearly ten years on from this picture, Hidden grew dull because you realised well before the end that Haneke wasn’t going to provide the solution to a mystery that you were primed from filmgoing experience to expect.  In Funny Games too, a good deal of what’s on screen is progressively overshadowed by his approach to delivering it.

Some of the most horrifying moments occur when Paul and Peter take a short break from terrorising their victims.   These provide a breathing space for the viewer – you feel yourself relax until you realise you shouldn’t because the family’s circumstances haven’t changed.   When the pair leave the premises for a while this effect is magnified:  at last, you feel, it’s safe – then you think of the child’s dead body lying by the television.  In spite of the audience’s supposed relationship with Paul, there’s a much greater kinship with Anna and Georg, and not only because you want them to get out of this alive (and because they too may experience these moments as temporary respite before the force of their situation wallops them again). The relationship of the couple to their torturers is analogous to the audience’s relationship with Haneke:  we’re thankful for small mercies.  The killings of the dog, the boy and the man all happen out of sight, even if within earshot.  When Paul commands Anna to strip, he puts a cushion cover over Schorschi’s head so that he doesn’t see – a gesture of ‘moral decency’ (as Paul describes it) which is contemptuous but which does make things significantly less bad for Anna than they would otherwise be.  Haneke doesn’t show Anna’s naked body; he keeps the camera on her face and you’re grateful to him – even though Susanne Lothar’s face is desperately expressive, as is Ulrich Mühe’s as he avoids looking at her.  (And the sound of Anna’s clothes coming off is shocking.)

Dehumanisation is persistent in Funny Games – not only in Paul’s and Peter’s treatment of their victims but in repeated visual details.  In the prologue that brings the family to the lake, we see hands putting CDs in and taking them out well before we see the faces of the people to whom the hands belong.  When Anna is preparing the evening meal before the arrival of Paul and Peter, the focus is again on her hands, washing salad leaves and slicing meat.  Yet the film involves us primarily for the same reason as a less subversive piece of work might engage us – the people.   It matters what happens to the family because Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe and eleven-year-old Stefan Clapczynski make it matter.  Powerless to protect his wife and son, Mühe’s Georg sits brimming with shame as well as fear.  His shouts and sobs of anguish, when Anna embraces him after Schorschi has been murdered, are even harder to listen to than the boy’s terrified yells were earlier on.  The secondary reason to keep watching is that Haneke is an exceptionally fluent film-maker even though that fluency, in this case, is offensive.   The combination of the characters’ situation and the implacable, often static camera brings the objects of the rooms in which the family is trapped to horrible life (including a kitchen clock – which tells the wrong time?)

I may be making too much of that quote from Film as Catharsis and imputing to Haneke a larger anti-Americanism than he really feels but it’s hard to ignore the evidence of what he appears to regard as American cultural barbarism.  Paul and Peter call each other Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butt-head.  As Georg sits alone in the kitchen, you notice a Mickey Mouse magnet on the fridge behind him.  European opera is violently usurped by the sounds of a New York band.  I don’t know how Haneke came to do a shot-for-shot remake of Funny Games with a transatlantic setting in 2008 but you feel it was almost to use American movie externals to drive home an anti-American cinema point.   It’s striking that, while the baddies in the remake were played by Americans (Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt), the unfortunate husband and wife were played by non-Americans (Tim Roth and Naomi Watts).

22-28 April 2012