And surely only Herr Haneke would be wayward enough to remake Funny Games, his 1997 Austrian hit thriller, now recreated shot for shot and word for word in English? His intention, of course, was to shake the Americans out of their bourgeois complacency by lobbing a nasty Pinteresque whirligig that left all who viewed it first time around checking under their bed for weeks. US audiences have, in turn, stayed away in their droves.
We can perhaps understand their lack of enthusiasm. Funny Games is often less like a movie and more like assault and battery with some Brechtian old hat. To that end, we must endure winks at the camera and self-reflexive noises about Hollywood’s love of violence as entertainment. Long outmoded in 1997, these modernist stratagems seem even more antiquated a decade on at a time when mainstream comedies are postmodern enough to end with Will Ferrell and Jon Heder sailing off through the clouds.
Like Gus Van Sant’s baffling remake of Psycho, a good deal of the original cultural relevance has been lost in the translation. Younger viewers will hardly stir with recognition to see video-tapes and hear references to Beavis and Butthead.
But the director’s contempt for his audience and their bloodlust still makes for stirring, provocative cinema. Watching a bourgeois family – Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are husband and wife, Devin Gearhart is their young son – fall prey to Haneke’s avenging agents is still one of the most thrilling, nauseating, compelling spectacles around. Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, channelling Leopold and Loeb, arrive as polite young men in white gloves and proceed to draw their reluctant hosts into a series of fiendish tortures. To ensure the director is not tainted by the pursuit of visceral kicks he wishes to snarl at, the violence occurs primarily off screen. As with Mr. Blonde’s ear slicing in Reservoir Dogs, that doesn’t make it any less discombobulating.
Watching this mesmerising, bleak trajectory you’re left feeling like the kid who was forced to smoke a million cigarettes having been caught with one. Take that, screen violence.