Ha-ha

FUNNY GAMES — Michael Haneke, USA, 2008, 5

Rarely does a single number so poorly sum up my reaction to a film as this one. It doesn’t mean, as “5” usually does, that I think the film is passably mediocre, with good points and bad points in about equal proportion. I’ll be writing about two such “5-grade” movies next. Not this time — FUNNY GAMES is a brilliantly done thesis that frankly flirts with moral depravity (and in a certain sense, it simply IS depraved). But there’s one big honking question that I never got satisfactorily answered:

Why?

Haneke himself, who I count as one of my three favorite foreign directors (the Dardennes and Von Trier being the others), made this movie 10 years ago, when he was still a barely-known director in Austria. And I don’t mean that he made another movie titled FUNNY GAMES; I mean that he made, to the extent that one can, the exact same movie, with nary a change in the shots, in the angles, in the decor, in the story details. I’ve seen the Austrian movie twice — it’s #4 on my 1998 list, though it only moved up on a second retrospective viewing.¹

But FUNNY GAMES, whether 1.0 or 2.0, is a deliberately repellent movie — a couple of well-mannered and -dressed teens insinuate their way into a bourgeois family’s vacation home and proceed to play a game of tormenting them, unto death. And the point … well, there isn’t one, and that’s the whole point really (which is ultimately what makes this morally-indefensible film morally defensible; it’s as morally ugly as pointless nihilism should be). Haneke denies all meaning, all narrative logic, all social criticism, all context to its violence — in fact, the film explicitly mocks those very ideas.