Silly

Michael Haneke once stated that the intention behind 'Funny Games' was that, if you couldn't watch it all the way through, then you didn't need to.

I'm not sure about that. I don't think I like the idea that a film director knows better than I do what I need to watch, or what I don't need to watch. I did watch 'Funny Games' all the way through, and it's a movie about two guys who torture a family to death. No more, no less. Michael Haneke may want to believe that it's some sort of endurance test or moral lesson for the viewer, but it's not. It's just a movie, and an arthouse movie at that. It changes nothing. If he'd wanted to change the way people think about violence, he should have been Paul Verhoeven, who had the commercial suss to make mainstream movies and the artistic daemon to make them so needlessly violent that they turned off mainstream audiences. Now that's a radical move, if you want one. And I'm still not sure that that changed anything, but at least it reached people who don't watch movies with subtitles.

It reminds me of John Cage's famous silent piece of music, "4' 33"". In that piece, a pianist refrains from playing the piano for four and a half minutes. Cage's intention was that the listener would start to regard the ambient sounds as music. The piece is normally performed in concert halls, and as a result, each performance ends up sounding the same: like a couple of hundred people trying to keep quiet. Chairs squeak, people cough, air conditiong systems buzz. What was meant as a radical gesture ends up being utterly predictable. 'Funny Games' is the same kind of thing; it's highly unlikely that anyone who watches it will be unaware of what the point of the movie is. Haneke is preaching to the converted, and I don't understand why everyone seems to think that that's such a great idea.

Why two stars rather than one? I'm not sure. Technical competence, maybe. Haneke makes condescending schlock and tells us that if we find it boring, then there's something wrong with us. Phooey. It's a movie. If he wants to save lives, he should volunteer for the Red Cross.

Incidentally, since I originally wrote this review I've found out that I am not alone in thinking 'Funny Games' idiotic. No less a filmmaker than Jacques Rivette (Paris Nous Appartient, Celine et Julie Vont En Bateau, La Belle Noiseuse, Histoire de Marie et Julien) called this film in a sensesofcinema.com interview 'a disgrace, just a complete piece of s***!'. Look it up if you don't believe me.

3/10