Toward the end of the film, after the young men have murdered the little boy and the neighbors , injured George, and beaten and shamed Ann, she manages to grab a gun and shoot Corbet. This leads Pitt to pick up a remote control and rewind the actual movie, preventing her from doing it.
OK, so a woman whose child and friends have been killed and who faces certain death herself picks up a rifle in self-defense and blows away a sadist? And I refuse to play your games. IE 11 is not supported. To some extent, he continues in that vein even after Paul beats his leg in with a golf club. Throughout Funny Games, Georg remains curiously subdued. But we also sense that he perhaps thinks he may eventually be able to reason with these lunatics, or at least buy his family some time.
Anna, though no match physically for the two men, is far more resistant. She seems to understand, better than anybody else, that they cannot be dealt with rationally.
Part of the conflict in Funny Games is the subtle one between Anna and Georg, whose responses to this unprecedented and unexplainable attack on their lives differ sharply. Because the violence enacted on them is so absurd, the family itself has to be convincing.
Because the director does follow a conventional thriller structure to give us one big, graphic, visceral moment. This plays like a cathartic action-flick climax—the kind designed to elicit an audience response. Viewers reportedly applauded the shooting during the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, that supposed temple of refined spectatorship. And this is when Haneke pulls out his most outrageous fourth-wall-breaking tactic.
Paul, stunned at what has just transpired, finds the TV remote, pauses Funny Games itself as if it were a video, and then rewinds the film, so that he can safely remove the shotgun right as Anna reaches for it. Throughout Funny Games, he has been giving us what we want: suspense mixed with just enough self-awareness to keep us riveted.
Whenever things would threaten to get too cruel, he would pull back the curtain a little, reminding us of the artifice. And for all its provocations, Funny Games has still continued to function as a genre film—a particularly ruthless one, but a genre film nonetheless.
But by denying us catharsis at this point—or rather, giving it to us and then promptly yanking it away—the movie finally betrays the assumed pact a thriller makes with its audience. After this notorious rewind moment, we see the final murder, as the two men calmly take Anna out on a boat and push her into the water with a minimum of fuss, suspense, or drama.
Even a small knife that was left on the boat in close-up early on, as if it might become a narrative device that would gain greater importance later, is tossed away ever so casually. And what are they talking about as they kill her? Paul and Peter, we understand, are not just perpetrators but spectators as well. Have they become the audience, or were they the audience all along? Does it even matter? The final close-up, of Paul staring and smiling into the camera again as he prepares to attack his next victims, is no longer a confrontation.
It is a reflection. By Christina Newland. By Devika Girish. This uncanny tale of existential anxiety stands out as the most rigorously pared-down American science-fiction film of the s. What makes "Funny Games" different than any other campy-scary horror movie that gets off on tormenting its characters and teasing its audience? Not much. It's being pitched to the "Hostel" crowd who are invited to laugh and the art-house crowd who are invited to feel ennobled as they shake their heads and lament the state of violence in movies.
Haneke whose masterworks include "Code Unknown" and "Cache" explains that his distinctively European film is "a reaction to The concept is the movie, kind of like Andy Warhol's ''Empire'' , an eight-hour stationary shot of the Empire State Building.
You don't have to sit through the whole thing to get the point, unless you really want to. Rated R for terror, violence and some language. Naomi Watts as Ann. Tim Roth as George. Michael Pitt as Paul. Brady Corbet as Peter. Devon Gearhart as Georgie. Reviews Your choice: Sadism or masochism? Jim Emerson March 13, Now playing.
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