| CINTERNATIONAL FILM FORUM |
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presents "Funny Games" directed by Michael Haneke |
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The boys-above-suspicion, at least initially, are well-mannered, of a social class that encourages tolerance, such as in the case of Leopold and Loeb, or even the Brat Pack genres. How much safer the world would be if potential victimizers would at least wear a bum's uniform, a mean way about them. In keeping with what might be called the art of victimization ethos, there is no "explanation" as to motivation. Psychologizing one's way to an hypothesis seems quite unsatisfactory. They do it because they do it. Gertrude Stein could have told us that. Director Haneke is actually a moralist who wants to say that there is an explanation: that media is desensitizing. However, it seems equally likely that there is no explanation whatever. |
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Copyright 1998
Cinternational |
FUNNY
GAMES, Austria, 1997, directed by Michael Haneke, depicts
an apparently idyllic, upper middle class life style family innocently
beginning a respite at their lakeside summer home. Anna is in the
kitchen unpacking groceries. In retrospect, the ominous delayed
closing of the door, as a young man named Peter, who has been invited
in while Anna fetches the eggs he has requested, sets a mode of
delayed viewer reactions. To be sure, this is parallel to Anna's
delayed realization that Peter is anything but a friend of her friend
Eva dwelling in a nearby summer home. Peter drops the eggs, the
viewer begins to feel the pennies drop psychically. Peter shoves
Anna's portable phone in the dishwater. No real time to be subtle,
if a level of radical violence is the goal in a brief stretch.