The Quiet Horror of the End of History

Funny Games by Michael Haneke has been re-released. About how this famous film of the late 1990s was perceived at the time of its appearance and later, already in the new century, tells Andrey Plakhov.

The film had its world premiere at the 50th Anniversary Cannes Film Festival in 1997; it was she who became his emblem and remained in the memory of the first viewers forever. Then the thesis about the “end of history” was fashionable; it seemed that there would be no more global wars, and the term “new violence” appeared in the cinema – fake, playful, like Quentin Tarantino. However, films shown at that time in Cannes, saturated with violence without quotes, destroyed this illusion. Where is it more dangerous to be in 1997 – in Paris, in London, in Los Angeles or in Sarajevo? Or in Cannes itself, where after the premiere of the film “The End of Violence” directed by Wim Wenders, attacked by bandits? The anniversary festival turned out to be a record one in terms of the number of thefts, attacks and other criminal excesses: it seemed a little more, and the screen would provoke a real murder.

It turned out, however, that the most dangerous thing was in a comfortable country house on the shores of an Austrian lake. Viewers of Funny Games were warned about the presence of almost unbearable scenes. And not in vain: even some hardened film critics could not stand it and left the screening a quarter of an hour before the final, escaping in a bar with a glass of whiskey. It all starts with the visit of neighbors’ guests – that is, not the neighbors themselves, but some friends or relatives who visited them for the weekend. Two polite guys come to the house to borrow four eggs for an omelet. And after two hours of screen time, everything ends with the total extermination – without any visible reasons and benefits – of a peaceful family. Dear guests turn out to be sadists and thugs, which they themselves did not suspect a couple of hours ago: their reactions are so spontaneous, only gradually moving from the area of ​​domestic quarrels to professional sadism. Won’t tomorrow morning the “guests” who have come to taste fry their omelet with another family in the neighborhood?

The bloody mass is played out against the backdrop of a cultivated nature and a feral culture, which is torn from the TV constantly turned on in the house – this vampire, hypnotist and provocateur. Modern violence has ceased to be class or archaic; it stems from the publicity of our existence, permeated by the tentacles of the mass media. “The emptiness of the screen contains potential violence … so it is better not to be in a public place where television works: the possibility of violence provoked by its very presence is too great,” wrote Jean Baudrillard. However, Haneka doesn’t need a television to stick another pointing finger into it. And if you point to something, then something completely different. When one of the victims grabs a gun and cracks down on the villain, the hall rejoices. But this is just an outburst of mischievous imagination; the film is rewound, the real crowds out the desired, and we again see an unpunished orgy of sophisticated atrocities. Both fortune and the sacred fetishes of the modern world (such as a wet and passed out mobile phone) are always on the side of the killers, not the victims.

Funny Games is Tarantino’s European answer. According to Haneke, this is not a thriller, but “a film about a thriller”. Violence in the films of the Austrian director intrigues and paralyzes with its mysteriousness, elusive irrational nature – with outwardly dry concreteness of presentation. Haneke began his exploration of the quiet horrors of post-industrial civilization in the late 1980s and early 1990s with The Seventh Continent and Benny’s Video Tapes. And already in the new century he became famous for the paintings “Pianist”, “White Ribbon” and “Love”; the last two were awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. But Funny Games stands apart in his work; nowhere did he show up so strongly as a voyeur, putting the stunned viewer in the same position.

Ten years later, the director made an English-language remake of Funny Games. It does not have the infernal nature of the original, although it is almost a frame-by-frame reconstruction and it is still scary to watch. Haneke reproduces himself with the scrupulousness and perfectionism of a maniac capable of stepping into the same water twice. However, the internal difference is huge, and the accents are even more rigid and definite.

In the original version, Austrian and German actors who were not very well-known outside their countries played (only later Ulrich Mühe, the star of the GDR theater, became famous in the film “The Lives of Others”). In the American version, the roles of the owners of the house were played by Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, and one of the villains in an ominous white tennis uniform and equally white gloves is played by Michael Pitt; this casting gives the film a Hollywood flavor. But the director who hates him is not at all embarrassed by this. He uses the language of the enemy mainstream to camouflage his cold constructivism.

The effect is greatly enhanced by the fact that Khanek’s “thrillers” are static, out of genre, characterless and plotless; their heroes kill just like that, not out of revenge or self-interest, without even getting any pleasure from this process. They are veritable angels of extermination, as mythological as the Islamic suicide bombers, but purged of ideology. The “new violence” became old and familiar again after September 11, 2001. The Funny Games remake is a kind of nightmare: once you were raped in a particularly perverted form, and now you dream that the rapist’s cabal consisted entirely of Hollywood stars.