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There's a justified tendency to turn one's nose up at the unhealthy American habit of snubbing films from the old continent and only distributing them domestically after making English remakes that, in the best cases, add nothing to the original works. In the case of Funny Games, the Austrian film that back in 1997 helped establish the provocative Michael Haneke among the major European directors at the turn of the millennium, the discussion is somewhat different, more complex. The American remake comes exactly ten years after the original, is once again directed by Haneke, and benefits, at the director's express request, from the presence of what has, since Mulholland Drive, become the official muse of 'sick' auteur cinema, Naomi Watts.
The undertaking has its significance, which perhaps goes beyond the (legitimate) attempt by the director to attract new viewers. America, the country that has, apparently, shattered the taboos of vision more than any other and transformed its viewers into voyeurs accustomed to every kind of visual atrocity, seems indeed the ideal recipient of a film that above all aims to be a reflection on cinematic violence.
The plot of Funny Games (a peaceful family taken hostage and subjected to all kinds of violence by two young assailants) is the bare-bones framework of a stripped-down slasher movie, devoid not only of any narrative frills (except for the distressing chase scene involving little Georgie, the action is practically static, occasionally interrupted by sudden bursts of violence) but also of any social or psychological background that could provide justification or purpose to the madness of the two young attackers.
Haneke uses this non-plot to weave a reflection on violence and how it is portrayed, according to what Mereghetti would call the "morality of the gaze."
Three times, the character played by Michael Pitt looks towards the camera and directly addresses the viewers, like Jean-Paul Belmondo in A bout de souffle. This is not the only metafilmic concession. At a certain point, towards the end—when after a sudden twist of events, the situation seems to turn in favor of the protagonists—Pitt grabs the remote control and, pressing rewind, quite unexpectedly... "rewinds" the film, returning to the previous scene to enable a different conclusion.
Devices like this, which break the linearity and plausibility of the story, emphasize the fact that the real protagonist of the film is the voyeuristic viewer: the horror that appears on screen is nothing but a spectacle created specifically for him (and, indeed, words like "show" and "spectacle" often recur in the surreal dialogues of the two attackers), who is at once a victim (horrified, powerless, fascinated) and an accomplice of the violence depicted on the screen.
The ways in which Haneke chooses to depict this horror are striking. Where violence in American cinema has long been reduced to a cheerful and hectic spectacle of blood and severed limbs, in Funny Games it is filmed in a way that cannot fail to upset viewers accustomed to mainstream horror cinema. The two hours of the film indeed flow slowly, at times excruciatingly, and almost entirely without a soundtrack. Haneke is not afraid of drawn-out scenes, emptiness, dilations (there's an unforgettable scene midway through the film centered on a single slow and silent shot of Naomi Watts attempting to untie herself), of tension that develops slowly and unbearably, starting from the prologue where, with Hitchcockian mastery, signals of unease (the "strange" behavior of the neighbors, the leitmotif of the broken eggs...) gradually disrupt the quiet daily routine of the bourgeois family. Purely Hitchcockian, too, is the attention to objects (mobile phones, golf clubs, remote controls...) and environments, loaded with meaning by the shots.
Haneke's approach to violence is profoundly and ambiguously moral: deaths are always filmed offscreen, and it is no coincidence that one of the emblematic images of the film is that of a child with his head covered by a bag. An approach capable of restoring all the horror to viewers anesthetized by years of television and cinematic "pornography."
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