I first encountered the original version of this film back at UCF, in one of my classes. Certainly up to the task, Haneke's Funny Games provided a forum for discussion of the treatment of violence in film and entertainment. Why do we find it so fascinating? How does it entertain us? What part of our psyche causes us to continually and (most importantly) voluntaraly subject ourselves to manufactured images of destruction and carnage? Haneke raises all these questions by making a film about violence without showing a single act of it on screen. Funny Games has no remorse, no pay off; the good guys don't win and the bad guys don't lose. By making violence as senseless as possible, and by their self-awareness as characters in a film (at one point they even rewind the film when things don't go their way), Peter and Paul break through our zombie-like numbness towards violence and force us to ask why?
For this, I love the film. It purposfully gives the audience nothing in the way of reconciliation or explanation, and the frustration is welcome. You leave the film feeling uneasy, and not because of fear, but because there is no resolution to tie everything up nice and neat; nothing to assuage the fact that you just spent 10 dollars and 2 hours of your life watching a family be destroyed for no reason.
What I don't understand is why, 10 years later, Haneke decided to make an almost shot-for-shot remake. In the US version, the characters speak English, and the actors playing them are well-known. I suppose by using A-listers such as Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, Haneke makes a nod to Hollywood that helps drive the point home to American audiences, which is important if this film is to succeed in the box office. I appreciate that the redux was just as difficult to watch as the original, because if it weren't the entire essense of the film would be compromised. The new version is just as powerful as the old, and for this I am grateful. My hope is that some of the people who may have been tricked into seeing this, thinking it to be just another Hollywood thriller, actually come out thinking a little more about the content of their entertainment.
