At least when Shimizu remade Ju-On into the American The Grudge he took advantage of a bigger budget and higher end effects to try and pump up his original horror film. The two films were definitely similar but not identical. Haneke, on the other hand, barely makes any changes. He swaps out his German actors for Hollywood stars, tweaks a few lines of dialogue but essentially makes a carbon copy of his original film. You could project both films simultaneously and they might line up almost exactly (there's barely a minute difference in the running times). I can understand a filmmaker wanting to go back to an earlier work to change and improve what he had originally done - after all, who hasn't looked back on some earlier project and not wanted to make some improvements. But Haneke doesn't seem to want to improve on what he did, in fact he seems quite pleased with his first effort. But having Naomi Watts produce and star in a remake of your film does generate buzz and guarantee that it will reach a larger audience.
Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet in Funny Games U.S. (Warner Independent)
The story is very simple: two excessively polite young men named Paul and Peter (Michael Pitt being especially unnerving and Brady Corbet), dressed in tennis whites and white gloves, arrive at the gated vacation home of a rich couple (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth) and their adolescent son (Devon Gearhart). They ask to borrow some eggs for the neighbors they are staying with and then they proceed to terrorize and brutalize the family for the next 12 hours (mercifully for the audience this is reduced to a screen time of 107 minutes).
On one level the way Haneke has remade his own film does make sense. The first Funny Games was like an exercise in sadistic cinema. It wasn't really a drama or a narrative film offering depth and complexity. It was more like an experiment on Haneke's part to see if he could be as cruel, sadistic and motiveless as the sociopathic characters in his film. So the new Funny Games U.S. just extends the experiment. It's as if Haneke were a dispassionate scientist and said, "Okay, we have tried this on one sample group, let's try it on another and see if the results are the same." So the story and filmmaking style remain the same but the actors and the audiences are different. The new hypothesis: will the film work as well under these new conditions?
The answer is yes. Both films create excruciating tension and discomfort as the on-screen family and the viewers have no escape from their tormentors. And for many Haneke is one of those tormenters. He does to the audience what the polite lads in the film do to the family. Haneke's filmmaking style is as calm and dispassionate as the lead psycho Paul, and as smug and self-satisfied.
Arno Frisch in Funny Games, and Micahel Pitt in Funny Games U.S. (Attitude Films and Warner Independent)
***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***
I can't talk about tis film without revealing something about what happens, so skip the next two paragraphs if you don't want any further details about what occurs.
There are moments when Paul looks directly into the camera and winks or turns to the audience to remind them that they are incapable of preventing the violence to come. Paul and Haneke even tease and taunt the audience. Paul by pretending to give the family the hope of a way out; and Haneke by leaving a knife on the family yacht where we expect one of the family members to be able to make use of it. Hollywood has taught us that such foreshadowing is to provide a comfort zone for audiences so they can look hopefully to escape. At another point, Haneke goes even further to allow for a brief moment of vengeance only to have it taken away. But Haneke does all this in a smugly manipulative manner befitting Paul. As with Wes Craven's Last House on the Left , the discomfort level of Funny Games has a lot to do with the fact that the audience feels the filmmaker is as twisted as the characters he's depicting. At one point a family member asks, "Why are you doing this?" To which Paul simply says, "Why not." That seems to be Haneke's answer to why he made the first film and why the sequel. Haneke could also use his character for further justification of his filmmaking approach. When Paul is asked why not just kill everyone quickly and be done with it, Paul replies that you shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment.
On one level I appreciate what Haneke does. Hollywood horror films tend to either be jokey or to end with a sense that the terror has been destroyed (at least until the next sequel). They adhere to certain taboos - children usually go unharmed, someone survives, and the baddies pay in some way. But Haneke doesn't abide by such rules and he unnerves his audience because their sense of security within genre conventions has been blown away. This is along the lines of what Hitchcock did by killing his star Janet Leigh in the first half of Psycho . Audiences were jolted because they had the expectation that the star, even if killed off, would at least make it to the end of the movie. Haneke is not nearly as talented as Hitchcock but his film does work toward a similar effect. It wants to upset audience expectations.
***END SPOILERS***
Although Haneke's film is disturbing, he actually shows very little onscreen violence. A gunshot occurs off screen and we only discover what has happened when we return to the room where the violence occurred. The terror comes from the odd disconnect between the polite exterior of Paul and Peter, and their total lack of emotion and compassion, They have no humanity and that's what's terrifying. There is nothing to appeal to in them. In many ways they are more terrifying than all the Freddies, Jasons and Jigsaws. I mean if you see a guy with a burnt face and knives for fingers or someone in a hockey mask with an ax - you run. But if a preppie, good-looking young man that you saw with your neighbors comes over and nicely asks to borrow some eggs, your guard doesn't immediately go up.
Confrontation in the 1997 film and in the 2008 one. (Attitude films and Warner Independent)
So in one respect, I appreciate Funny Games U.S. as an exercise in sadistic horror. Yet when the film ends (especially after a couple cheap tricks Haneke pulls), I was also left asking, "What was the point of all this?" Haneke proves that he can make a film that mimics the motiveless, amoral pathology of a pair of sociopaths, but to what end? Do we feel enlightened? Not really. Are we impressed by Haneke's skill? To an extent. But like the senseless crimes he depicts, we walk away feeling the waste of a senseless crime.
Again, this returns us to the notion that the film is nothing more than an experiment, an attempt by Haneke to just see if he could pull a stunt like this off. His remake feels very by the numbers but then so too did the original. Both films have a very plain, static visual approach that reflects the bland, one dimensional perspective of the characters. But the stillness of the images becomes creepy because it is not what we expect in a horror film. Although class could be seen as an issue, Haneke doesn't really seem interested in developing that. Paul and Peter tell so many stories that you're not sure if they are bored rich kids or vengeful poor ones. However, Haneke does enjoy using the gated homes. The walls and gates make the families feel safe but it's a barrier that's easy to break through and sometimes hard to break out of. What was designed to keep the bad guys out, ends up trapping the family. Haneke also uses the home security device of motion sensor lights as something that's turned against the family as it alerts Paul to where the son has run off to in the night.
The different approaches to advertising. The German/Austrian poster on the left and the U.S. poster on the right. (Attitude Films and Warner Independent).
Funny Games U.S.( rated R for terror, violence and some language) is very much like Last House on the Left and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. All three of these films raise questions about violence in movies. On a certain level, I've always felt that violence in movies should disturb the viewer. If you can watch violence and be unaffected, then that's dangerous. But films like these tend to stir protest precisely because they are disturbing in their depiction of something horrific from the real world - motiveless killers. When I interviewed Wes Craven a couple of years ago, he provided some insight into the mind of a horror director. He said, "The first time I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre , I concluded that it must have been made by a group of Manson-ites because it had exactly that quality, it was kind of greenish grainy and the whole thing looked home made. It was always ironic to meet Tobe Hooper later because he was the sweetest guy in world. So I devised a theory, and that is that the first monster you must frighten an audience with is the director because I think it's important that the audience feel that this is outside the boundaries of anything that is controlled or acceptable or polite or civilized. Because that's where these fears come from. It doesn't come from the civilized matrix, it comes from outside of that. A film that looks like it was made by a bunch of people rather than a corporation immediately puts you on footing that's shaky."
If Haneke wanted to scare and disturb his audience then I would say he succeeds. And I like the way he does manage to put audiences on shaky ground. Yet in the end I also feel like there should be something more. The recent atmospheric thrillers from Europe - With a Friend Like Harry, Lemming, The Bridesmaid - achieve similar levels of discomfort but with greater artistry and engagement of ideas.
Companion viewing: Last House on the Left, Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, Funny Games (1997), The Desperate Hours (1955), With a Friend Like Harry, The Bridesmaid , Lemming
If you have something to say about this film or about how violence is depicted in movies, join us Wednesday March 19 at 10:00am for The Film Club of the Air on KPBS-FM Radio's & These Days when Funny Games will be one of the new films up for discussion.
