Funny games (2)

Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke won the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe in 2010 for The White Ribbon. It was such a starkly menacing B&W depiction of pre-Nazi Germany that its failure to win that year's Oscar caused surprise. Maybe the following quotation [in Wikipedia] from Haneke's writings helps explain the deliberate rejection by so many Oscar voting members:

"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment 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." [From "Film as catharsis"]

Maybe Hollywood also never forgave him for his US$15-million 2007 English-language replica of his U$5-million 1997 German-language psycho-thriller, as Funny Games U.S. It doesn't so much empower its audiences as strip their souls naked, forcing them to see themselves as voyeurs and puppets. European film-makers often do that; Hollywood doesn't. It enjoys making Cape Fears, Saws, Hostels and Elm Streets galore, but they are not designed for audiences to look deep into mirrors of self-loathing. American movie-goers are trained to expect endings that are happy, virtuous, up-beat and escapist: Good triumphs and Evil is vanquished. Reality is different, and Funny Games rubs its audiences' noses in that brutal fact.

Naomi Watts executive-produced the remake, in which she stars as Ann, a rich housewife arriving for a summer vacation with her husband George (Tim Roth) and young son at their lakeside estate. Their neighbours are entertaining a pair of young men, one of whom walks over to borrow some eggs. When his pal enters the scene, he admires a golf club, and uses it to slaughter the family dog (off-screen) and break one of George's legs. The family will die in a time-limited game, the polite young men announce. Lacking any background music and with no sudden nasty shocks, the expected tension and horror do not materialise, and Haneke soon explains why not.

One of the young men makes occasional to-camera comments, preparing his audience for one of the nastiest directorial tricks; it slaps Hollywood conventions in the face. Does the audience expect a "plot development"?, one of the killers asks ironically.

The only visible difference between the two films is the decision to dress both the white-gloved young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) in white tennis shorts in the US version; in the original one of them wore black shorts. The four lead actors in the US production are not as effective as the German-speaking cast, and the whole faithful re-make (including set design details) is impossible to justify.

Watts (Welsh-Australian) and Roth (Brit) lack the somewhat patrician air of their German counterparts, and Pitt (The Dreamers) doesn't display the menacing maturity of the original. He and Corbet are barely credible as fresh-faced psychopaths, but they (and Haneke's dialogue) do manage to side-step an audience's inevitable assumption of homo-eroticism or incestuous brotherhood. They also, maybe coincidentally, remind an audience of the deadpan faces of the repressed children in The White Ribbon.

Haneke has created two movies out of a slim plotline that's only worth a 30-minute short or staged play. He spun out his material with long static shots that heightened neither cinematic tension nor dramatic intensity. The opening's sunlit aerial shots hold great promise of a nail-biting psychological horror show, but one of Haneke's characterless killers deliberately sneers at an audience which expects promises to be kept, even if they're false.