Benny's Video (Michael Haneke, 1992)

Arno Frisch in Benny's Video

Cast: Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich Mūhe, Ingrid Stassner, Stephanie Brehme, Stefan Polasek. Screenplay: Michael Haneke. Cinematography: Christian Berger. Production design: Christoph Kanter. Film editing: Maria Homolkova. 

Sometimes I admire the unsparing vision of Michael Haneke's films, and sometimes I think he's just bullying us. I felt that way at the beginning of Benny's Video when he showed the slaughter of a hog twice in succession. Later, when I knew why he did it, I felt more accepting. And yet, by the end of the film, when a sort of justice is done to his characters, who are both disturbed and disturbing, I felt nothing but a kind of resentment at being toyed with for 110 minutes. Haneke is a great manipulator, able to make you believe in his characters and the ghastly situations they put themselves in, but to what end? If that's an objection, it could probably be made of any number of great filmmakers, starting with Alfred Hitchcock, but why do I feel that in films like Benny's Video Haneke represents the decadence of an art form, and not what he seems to be trying to suggest: the decadence of our civilization? 

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Arno Frisch in Funny Games 

Anna: Susanne Lothar
George: Ulrich Mühe
Paul: Arno Frisch
Peter: Frank Giering
Schorschi: Stefan Clapczynski
Gerda: Doris Kunstmann
Fred: Christoph Bantzer
Robert: Wolfgang Glück
Gerda's Sister: Susanne Meneghel
Eva: Monika Zallinger

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Production design: Christoph Kanter
Film editing: Andreas Prochaska

Funny Games is Michael Haneke's cold and nasty take on the horror-thriller genre, particularly the home-invasion subgenre in which a psychopath traps a family in their home and torments them. The locus classicus of the genre is probably Cape Fear, in both the original film by J. Lee Thompson in 1962 and the 1991 remake by Martin Scorsese, although there have been plenty of other movies designed to needle our complacent sense that we're safe at home. Haneke's version is effective in that regard, although he takes the suspense a step further by making us complicit in the torture: Paul, the more dominant of the two young psychopaths in the film, breaks the fourth wall to wink and smirk and even talk at us as we watch his plans unfold. At one point, he says to us, referring to the family he's tormenting, "You're on their side, aren't you?" And at the point where, as in a conventional horror-thriller, the family seems to have turned the tables on their captors, he comments, "We're not up to feature film length yet," meaning that the plot must have a few twists to go. And finally, he shows us that we are among his captives: When Anna suddenly grabs the rifle and blows away Peter, the other tormenter, Paul grabs a video remote and rewinds the scene, then gains the upper hand again, leaving the family (and us) at his mercy. In sum, this is a nihilistic film, which Haneke designed to rub our noses in our prurience where violence is concerned. He wanted to film it in the United States, as a kind of statement about American violence, but was forced to make it in Austria. But after the film succeeded and Haneke had built his international career, he was able to remake Funny Games with an English-speaking cast in 2007. More on that version later.