"Funny Games" finds Austrian auteur Michael Haneke again chastising
our materialistic society for breeding huge amounts of decadence, dehumanization,
and spiritual death, especially among the bourgeoisie, which is too busy
plugging away at its dubious pleasures to realize that its collective soul
has been slaughtered and buried as definitively as the hapless thief in
"The Well," the disappointing Samantha Lang movie that showed
here the other day. Haneke's heroes are a middle-class family on vacation
in their lakeside hideaway, where they are visited, tormented, and eventually
killed by two men whose crisp young faces and hypocritically polite manners
recall the Nazi thugs who ravaged Europe not so long ago. (A friend pointed
out the Nazi critique to me in a conversation shortly after the screening;
since then I've found that some other people see the movie itself as an
echo of fascism--a provocative perspective, although I don't agree with
it.) As in Haneke's earlier "Benny's Video" and (less directly)
"The Seventh Continent," the target here is not only contemporary
materialism and self-satisfaction, but also modern media--symbolized by
a mobile phone that refuses to function dependably, and brought directly
into the narrative by a few surprising moments (and one that's downright
astonishing) when a character manipulates the action (and us in the audience)
as a self-aware part of the fiction. In all, the movie is sadistic, insufferable,
clever, and relentlessly compelling. See it if you dare.
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