FUNNY GAMES
Austria 1997. Director/Screenplay - Michael Haneke, Producer - Veit Heiduschka, Photography - Jurgen Jurges, Music - Pietro Mascagni & John Zorn, Special Effects - Danny Bellens, Willi Neuner & Mac Steinmaier, Production Design - Christoph Kanter. Production Company - Wega-Film. Susanne Lothar (Anne Schober), Ulrich Muhe (Georg Schober), Arno Frisch (Paul), Frank Giering (Peter), Stefan Clapczynski (Schorschi/Georgie Schorber)
Plot: A husband and wife and their young son head off to their lakeside holiday home. They are visited by two polite teenage boys, friends of their lakeside neighbours, initially come to borrow some eggs, but whose initial friendliness suddenly explodes into torture and sadistic games.
>From the film's opening credits where a family of three, on a placid drive to their holiday home change tapes on the car stereo and the gentle sounds of Mozart are suddenly replaced by a loud and raucous blast of death metal, director Michael Haneke signals his intent. And sure to his word `Funny Games' quickly shapes to be a film in the mold of `Straw Dogs', `The Last House on the Left' and `The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' wherein the idyll of a middle-class family is savagely overturned by outsiders and descends into a gruelling assault of sadism and torture.
It all begins innocently enough, with the introduction of the two boys, both dressed in white jerseys, shorts and plimsolls as though they were preppies returned from a day at the beach. An incident, which is comical in its gaucheness, where Frank Giering comes to borrow some eggs but keeps dropping them suddenly, unexpectedly turns violent. And from that point on `Funny Games' becomes a harrowing, psychologically gripping work of terror. (And one that not unfavourably compares to the aforementioned works above). The scenes of violence come with quite disturbingly casual regard - the dog and the child are blown away without any of the taboo reticence that affects Hollywood models. The casualness of the violence never comes more coolly understated than the shot focused on tormentor Arno Frisch who hears a gunshot ringing out from the next room while he is out in the kitchen making a sandwich and then calmly completes his sandwich before going to investigate. But director Haneke also propels home the full effect of the assault with emotionally gruelling regard - in one shot the camera remains in a single wide-angle for several minutes focused on a room with a body in one corner shot through the head, its blood splattering the tv, while wife Lothar sobs in the middle of the room and at the same time tries to drag herself past her grief to make an escape before the boys return. The prolonged effect of the shot is remarkably harrowing. The film is all the more effective for the performances of the two boys, especially Arno Frisch who manages quite unnervingly to swing between a perfect mannered politeness and casual sadism without the slightest change in expression - one moment insisting his tormentees stop screaming and start referring to everybody by their first name, the next breaking people's legs with golf clubs.
Haneke also manages to be surprisingly playful. At several points he starts to engage in meta-fictional (or should one say meta-filmic ?) play and has Frisch directly address the audience - turning to the camera to ask if the audience really thinks him as bad as his victims do; or offering a bet to his tormentees to see if they can stay alive until morning and then turning to ask the audience who they would bet on. At another point he decides that he will prolong the torture in order to pad the film out to feature length. And in the most amusing moment Lothar manages to get ahold of the gun and blow Giering away whereupon Frisch decides that things can't be allowed to happen that way, scrabbles for a remote control and rewinds the film to just before she got ahold of the gun so he can disarm her. Juggling between raw, disturbing violence and this sort of playful humour is extremely difficult a balancing act to get right without allowing the film to descend to bad taste or campiness, but it is to Haneke's credit that he succeeds.
Reviewed at the 1998 Wellington International Film Festival Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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