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.

The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Ulrich Mühe in The Castle

K.: Ulrich Mühe
Frieda: Susanne Lothar
Artur: Frank Giering
Jeremias: Felix Eitner
Barnabas: André Eisermann
Olga: Dörte Lyssewski
Amalia: Inga Busch
Erlanger: Hans Diehl
Pepi: Birgit Linauer
Narrator: Udo Samel

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Based on a novel by Franz Kafka
Cinematography: Jirí Stibr
Production design: Christoph Kanter

There's an odd resonance between Ulrich Mühe's frustrated K. in The Castle and the role for which he's best known in America, the anonymously gray Stasi spy Gerd Wiesler in The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006). Both are trapped in systems not of their making and are given tedious tasks that ultimately prove meaningless: K. to serve as a land surveyor in a village that doesn't want one and is so covered with blowing snow that there's hardly any land to survey, Wiesler to listen in on and try to trap a playwright whose crimes against the state are, if they exist, minimal. Both try to make the best of impossible situations, K. by doggedly persisting in his attempts to communicate with the unseen and unapproachable Castle, Wiesler by doing his job dutifully until its absurdity becomes intolerable. Absurdity is, to be sure, what Franz Kafka's unfinished novel is all about: People in it behave absurdly -- even the protagonist who, in a particularly dreamlike moment, finds himself hiding under a counter with the mistress of the man he wants to meet and having sex with her. Even the people who might help him, like his goofy assistants Artur and Jeremias or the eager emissary from the Castle, Barnabas, only lead him into further frustrations. Michael Haneke has followed the novel's plot faithfully, even to the extent of leaving off in mid-sentence at the point where the dying Kafka abandoned the manuscript. The result is a film both provocative and tedious: There's a scene near the end in which K. is struggling to stay awake, and I found myself fighting slumber, too. But the commitment with which Haneke and his cast throw themselves into a project that itself is a bit supererogatory -- does Kafka's unfinished story really need to be an unfinished film? -- is impressive.

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)

Amid the almost universal acclaim, including a best foreign-language film Oscar, for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, there were some complaints from residents of the former East Germany that the writer-director was not as hard on his Stasi snoop, Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), as he should have been. This is my second viewing of the film -- I saw it when it first appeared on DVD -- and I tend to agree. The movie as a whole is chilling -- well-plotted and well-acted -- but I'm not entirely convinced this time around by Wiesler's change of heart regarding the people he's surveiling: the playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his lover, the actress Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck). At the start of the film, when we first see Wiesler teaching a class to Stasi-spy hopefuls, he's the perfect cold gray participant in a monstrous system of internal domestic espionage. But later, as he learns not only that the motive for spying on Dreyman and Sieland is not merely political but also sexual -- the minister of culture, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Theime) wants Dreyman eliminated so he can have Sieland all to himself -- he begins to be disillusioned with his work. And after a friend of Dreyman's, the blacklisted theater director Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), commits suicide and Dreyman sits down at the piano to play a piece of music -- composed for the film by Gabriel Yared -- called Sonata for a Good Man that Jerska had given him, Wiesler betrays the first real emotion we see from him in the film: A tear rolls down his cold gray face. Donnersmarck has said that he was inspired by Lenin's statement -- referred to in one point in the film -- that he had to give up listening to music like Beethoven's "Appassionata" sonata because it humanized him, distracting him from the task of revolution. On the other hand, we have all heard the stories of Nazi concentration camp commandants who read Schiller and Goethe and listened to Mozart and Schubert and were never deterred from their horrendous work by it. The flaw in Donnersmarck's film, I think, is that despite Mühe's brilliant performance as Wiesler, we never get enough of his backstory to suggest why he should be suddenly so vulnerable to sentiment. How could he have risen in the ranks of the Stasi to the point that he became not only a trusted agent but also an instructor of future agents if he has this key weakness? On the other hand, it's not a crippling flaw, thanks to exceptional performances and well-handled suspense.