FUNNY GAMES

SYNOPSIS:
Classical music plays on the car stereo, as Anna (Susanne Lothar), Georg (Ulrich Mûhe) and their young son Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski) drive up to their idyllic lakeside holiday house. They make plans to go yachting and play golf with neighbours, everything seems set for a peaceful weekend away. But around sunset Peter, an apparently amiable if awkward young stranger, knocks at the back door and asks to borrow some eggs. This seemingly innocent request turns out to be the first move in a calculated and elaborate attack on the family mounted by Peter and his more suave friend Paul – an attack which gradually proceeds from polite intimidation to prolonged bouts of physical and psychological torture. As the immaculately courteous pair of psychopaths occasionally remind us, everything that happens is being stage-managed for the benefit of us, the audience. After all, aren't these elaborate scenes of violence what we've been waiting for all along?

"Since Michael Haneke's film is basically an attack on the audience, it's hard to talk about without seeming either defensive or obtuse. Haneke deliberately makes it impossible for us to separate his own 'funny games' from those played by his onscreen envoys, the smarmy hoodlums who spend the film torturing an innocent family for our delectation. Refusing to motivate his thugs in any psychological sense, Haneke instead stresses the constructed nature of what takes place. Peter and Paul literally wink at the cameras, inviting our complicity. At first ingeniously sinister, the film quickly becomes both distressing and insultingly cute, which is presumably the point. Haneke sets out to confront the audience with the ugliness of its desire for onscreen violence; Funny Games is a travesty of a thriller. (With its classical music, attractive scenery and well-bred, photogenic characters, it more maliciously travesties the bourgeois art film as well.) Individual viewers have to decide for themselves here, but I don't know that Haneke's strategic representations of violence and suffering are any less trivialising of real-life torture and murder than are the absurdist fictions of, say, Quentin Tarentino – who in turn isn't simply the flip sadist he's sometimes supposed to be. Which is to say that in neither art films nor Hollywood entertainment is it easy to depict evil while securely retaining the moral high ground. But it's precisely that unavoidable slippage and ambiguity that makes this fairly dubious film to some extent an interesting, troubling experience."
Jake Wilson