Wri/Dir. Michael Haneke
Running Time - 103min
A Dendy Films release

It is easy enough to complain or to make stultifying dramas, which is a suitable equivalent and a lovely escape. To woo the audience with action and then slip in a fatalistic moral of male betrayal leaves one with sickness of stomach and a head full of bad ideas. With Funny Games, Michael Haneke has made a film which refutes such simplistic tackiness, which does not allow pleasure awaiting damnation. There are no cheap thrills for it's audience, only lucidity plus long takes.

Below: One Two Three Four, everybody on the killing-floor
What Haneke has given us is American Psycho in reverse, a lack of detail forcing us to a point of choice. He can permit anything, can let his savage innocents perform any form of horror, because he has decided where to place them on screen and what their actions mean. A director with a vision can do whatever he chooses, and Haneke's system is to respect us for letting him have his choice. Off with the childrens head, into the river with the wife! For Haneke, a lack of moral judgement leads to the most irrefutable moral of all. The victims? Classic music guessing games and boundless commodities. The criminals? Bunuel's fickle children, bored with being bored.

All this results in a film that is profoundly difficult to watch, as inexorable as the pop culture push guiding Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butthead to the banal disposal of a family. What did I see in today's newspaper? A drug-addict holding a machete to a baby's neck demanding relief. To save private ryan we obviously have to watch the carnage, the director clinging to the real, irrefutable facts of graphic representation. The audience claps because they wept. The show is over and the moral is deservingly served out. How can one object to the dulling of the senses without sounding like one of the dulled, suspicious of the point that is slowly passing them by. Don't preach to me, don't bore me, just entertain me. In the end Godard is right. Advertising can show us The Battleship Potemkin in a single phrase, and as well as Eisenstein. The horror of violence, the attractive decadence of all that carnage has been planted in the ground and over-watered. The ascetic bore Haneke has the winning hand. Real time is nice, and the film can be rewound if things start to offend or shock us. It's okay to get worried and talk about it later. It is only a film.

adam rivett
comments? email the author