Double Vision

Few if any Hollywood films of 2008 promise to be as agitating—and illuminating—as one that was originally released in 1997 and has now been remade, shot-for-shot for American audiences, by its Austrian writer-director, Michael Haneke. Funny Games U.S.* retells the story of Funny Games, in which a handsome, well-to-do family (father, mother, and young son, played in the new version by Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and Devon Gearhart, respectively) arrive for a holiday at their waterfront weekend home only to find themselves the doomed captives of Peter and Paul (Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt), two immaculate degenerates who want to make a little merriment of their own. The scenario that follows is unrelentingly brutal but steadfastly defiant of the usual vulgarities of cinematic violence, a balancing act that is  but one of the feats that have earned Haneke his reputation as both a master and a muckraker of contemporary film.

Over the course of nine features—particularly in Der siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent, 1989), Benny’s Video (1992), 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls(71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 1994), Code inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000), Caché (Hidden, 2005), and, of course, Funny Games—the 65-year-old Haneke has turned his eye time and again to the subject of violence, its representations as well as its records, and the casualties of contemporary culture’s rabid faith in the mediated image. His infamous dictum that a film is “twenty-four lies per second” (upending Godard’s “cinema is truth at twenty-four frames per second”) articulates an aesthetic that challenges the ways and means of watching, and requires an audience to remain alert and ever suspicious of the fictions it is being shown. Haneke’s screenplays forgo a tidy arc in favor of an artful accrual of scenes, each of which in essence rewrites, by the meticulous apportioning of information, all the scenes preceding it. His camera seems to harness both his prowess and his contempt for imagemaking, a friction producing a photographic frame that, with Bressonian precision, admits grand absences and perpetually refers us to the world that is excluded from view.

Of course it is Haneke’s reputation for this brand of insurgence that causes one to suspect that Funny Games U.S. is something of a Trojan horse, for the film (even more than the original) may be his barest and most literal attack on the subject of cinematic violence, with American audiences as its explicit target. From hairpin turns of genre—thriller to horror to comedy and back again—to a villain’s direct address to the audience through the camera lens, to a deadeyed examination of effect without the buffer of cause, Funny Games U.S. mercilessly exposes the tatty seams of Hollywood’s blueprint storytelling. Viewers expecting to see monsters may be unsettled to find themselves staring into mirrors instead.

When I met Haneke last October in New York, on the occasion of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (he would leave the following day for Boston to attend his retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), the pressing question was not, as it had been for Funny Games, Why watch this film?—but rather, Why watch this film again? Although the remake is a routine enterprise in cinema, a director remaking his or her own film shot-for-shot is unprecedented, and the formal exactitude of Funny Games U.S. produces something that is as critically unwieldy as it is politically astute. I had foolishly hoped for some kind of sign or secret handshake from Haneke confirming that I had in fact cracked the film’s codes to reveal his intentions, but throughout our conversation he politely deferred to the audience’s powers of invention, and when it came to interpretation, preferred to keep open a door to possibility: “The film is supposed to happen in the mind of the viewer,” he said, “and not on the screen.” In this case, he has left his film to a writer who—by virtue of her overzealous imagination— has many ideas but little confirmation that what follows is the truth as Haneke sees it.