CINEMA: Funny Games

Funny Games was originally made as a German language film back in 1997 and now director Michael Haneke has decided to remake it, scene by scene, in English so that it can reach a larger audience. The problem is, many people won’t want to sit through a film that gets so caught up in its own conceit it comes across as smug and patronising.

Upper middle-class couple Anna (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) are making their annual trip to their summerhouse by a lake with their dog Lucky and son Georgie (Devon Gearhart). However, something seems out of the ordinary from the moment they arrive. Their neighbours are acting strangely and are entertaining two young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) they’ve never seen before. It is only when the two young men come knocking on her door that Anna realises something is seriously amiss and what starts as a series of ‘games’ turns into a deadly fight to save her whole family.

Haneke’s stated intention with the movie was to highlight the casual way violence is portrayed in American films and how that makes the audience complicit in what is happening on screen. Unfortunately, his film is so obviously composed and contrived (characters talk straight to camera, some scenes are rewound so they can be played back with alternative endings) the viewer is never under any misapprehension that what they are viewing is a fiction. It’s not real and you know it, thus rendering Haneke’s premise valueless.

Halfway through you may well lose patience with the whole enterprise –not so much funny ha ha, as really no fun at all.       Dee Pilgrim