FUNNY GAMES U.S.
(Review)

"I've been accused of 'raping' the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely—all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What's different about my films is this: I'm trying to rape the viewer into independence."
-- Michael Haneke

Well, consider me frakked.

In Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot English-language remake of his 1997 Funny Games, George and Ann Farber (Tim Roth and Naomi Watts) are a couple of rich, white folk vacationing at their lakeside home for a couple of weeks. They’ve brought their son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), and their dog, Lucky.
Naturally, in a film like this, when there’s a dog named “Lucky,” you can bet your bottom dollar that the mutt will be anything but.
You see, a pair of insanely courteous young lunatics (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) clad in immaculate white, are about to make a house call, all set to torture, not just the unlucky family, but the film’s audience as well.

With the cold, clinical precision that is his cinematic stock-in-trade, Haneke basically hijacks his audience and unleashes a confrontational and provocative indictment of what passes off as “entertainment” in today’s culture.
Funny Games U.S. (and its original Austrian progenitor) challenges its audience: so you like movies where people get tortured and terrorized? Well, see if you enjoy this.
With its largely static camerawork, its lack of a traditional musical score, and painfully frank performances, Funny Games U.S. presents the horrible scenario in a seemingly very real manner, while simultaneously tearing down the fourth wall on a number of occasions, reminding us that, A) this is a fiction, and B) we, the audience, are complicit in what we are witnessing.
Because this is, after all, unfolding for our entertainment.
Given that this is a decidedly non-Hollywood approach to the idea, and given that this is clearly Heneke’s agenda, it becomes obvious that Funny Games U.S. isn’t meant to be “entertainment.”
From all of what I’ve said above, it’s plainly evident that Funny Games U.S. is meant to be “art.”
And that’s I believe the sticking point of this entire quandary.

Let me use Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible as an example.
Irreversible is the sort of grueling cinematic experience that I really wouldn’t want to repeat. Viewing it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
But I do appreciate what Noe seems to be saying in it, the manner in which the narrative unfolds (begin at the end of the story in a very chaotic, nauseating manner, and work our way towards the beginning, with the camerawork gradually becoming calm and steady), part and parcel of his message.
Clearly, Irreversible is not entertainment. But I do believe that it is art.
So what’s to stop someone who makes a film that’s non-stop degradation and torture without any apparent message from claiming that there is, after all, a message (those who don’t “get it” merely ill-equipped to understand), and that his film is “art”?
And aren’t the lines that separate art and entertainment ultimately subjective?
Let’s face it: I may think Irreversible is art, but someone else will probably denounce it as filth and look at me like some sort of unhinged deviant for even considering Irreversible as a piece of art.
By the same token, I’m sure there are films out there others consider “art” that I, personally, just don’t get. (Apparently, I too, can be ill-equipped.)
Then there are those films that are ostensibly entertainment, and yet manage to say something substantial and potent about the human condition, that manage to bridge the gap and present some sort of hybrid.
Are they entertainment? Art? Or both?

Now, any Iguana regulars reading this will know that horror with significant subtext is pretty much my speed. As such, Haneke’s preaching to the choir here. (See, Herr Haneke, “No” really does mean “No.”)
But the reality is, I also happen to love films like the first Saw and Eli Roth’s Hostel films (particularly the second), because in them, I feel there is subtext, there are messages amidst the gore and the grue.
Now, whether or not Haneke will agree with me, I’ll never know. And for that matter, where is Haneke’s line, his personal demarcation between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” violence?
Shouldn’t all violence be unacceptable? But in a frank discussion of violence (the kind art can engage in), isn’t the depiction of it a necessity?
And with any depiction of violence, don’t we return to the question of acceptability? How much can we show so as to make our point?
So many questions…

In asking what Herr Haneke’s personal demarcation is though, I believe I’m missing the real point, which is, What is my personal demarcation? Where do I draw the line?
And where do you?

Parting shot: Reviews of Saw and Hostel II can be found in the Archive.

Parting shot 2: Incidentally, both Haneke and Noe were included by avclub.com in a list of 17 “Notorious Living, Working Cinematic Provocateurs,” which uses Haneke’s New York Times quote in its title.
Others on the list include Park Chan-Wook, Takashi Miike, Oliver Stone, Lars von Trier, and Michael Moore.

(Funny Games U.S. OS [design by Crew Creative Advertising] and UK quad courtesy of impawards.com; Funny Games DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; Funny Games U.S. images courtesy of ign.com.)

reVIEW (45)
DANS MA PEAU
(IN MY SKIN)
(Review)

When the French want to make you squirm, they really don’t kid around.
In recent years, films like Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, Fabrice Du Welz’s Calvaire, and Kim Chapiron’s Sheitan have played like violent, visceral assaults on their audiences.
Somewhere amidst all of that grueling cinema lands 2002’s Dans ma peau (In My Skin).

Directed and headlined by frequent François Ozon collaborator, Marina de Van, Dans ma peau introduces us to research analyst Esther, ambitious, hard-working, and in what appears to be a healthy relationship with Vincent (Calvaire‘s Laurent Lucas).
For all intents and purposes, Esther is normal.
But after she gashes her leg badly in a fall, an injury she doesn’t even notice till much later, Esther is gripped (and gradually overwhelmed) by an inexplicable compulsion to cut herself.

Given its grave subject matter of self-mutilation and the unflinching manner in which de Van approaches the material, Dans ma peau is one of those cinematic experiences that feels more like an endurance test than anything else, the kind of film I grow hesitant to view a second time.
Bereft of a traditional Hollywood cause and effect plot, and with its distinct refusal to shed light on the psychopathology of Esther’s dysfunction, Dans ma peau is clearly not for everyone, and is the sort of film that will repulse, revolt, and alienate many a viewer.
De Van disturbs, and ultimately, terrifies, her Esther gradually transforming over the course of the film into a single-minded obsessive, as we bear witness to the impact her newfound tastes have on her job and her relationship. (The dinner at around the midpoint of Dans ma peau has to be one of the most bizarre and unsettling ever committed to celluloid.)
Esther’s journey to reconfigure her psyche by carving into her own flesh has the lingering aftertaste of Cronenberg, a nightmare journey through the tantalizing realm of the organic. It also recalls Takashi Miike in its atrocious regard for the human body.

As I said, this certainly isn’t for everybody, but what is perhaps undeniable is the potent piece of transgressive cinema de Van has produced here.
I’m almost afraid to see what she comes up with for her feature length follow-up, Ne te retourne pas, with Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau…

Parting shot: A review of Chapiron‘s Sheitan can be found in the Archive.

(Dans ma Peau DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.co.uk; In My Skin DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

reVIEW (23)
OPEN WATER

Daniel and Susan (Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan) are off on a hastily-planned vacation, little knowing that they will face an ordeal that will test their will and resolve, an unpredictable twist of fate that leaves them stranded in shark-infested Open Water.

Shot by director/writer Chris Kentis with a regular camcorder—which gives it the look and feel of a faux documentary—Open Water is a decidedly uncomfortable film experience. Which is not to say it’s a bad film; it isn’t. The performances and the dialogue are rather good, giving us real people to identify with, as opposed to the annoyingly bland ciphers we had to endure in The Blair Witch Project, one of the films Open Water has been compared with. (More on that later.)
It’s just that it’s a film I don’t really care to watch a second time. Now, I’ve watched other films that I feel are far more harrowing than Open Water. Darren Aronofsky’s blisteringly hypnotic Requiem for a Dream and Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible come to mind, but the former is a horribly effective cautionary tale against drugs, and the latter’s storytelling technique (story’s end first, working our way towards the story’s beginning, ala Memento) manages to at least elevate the sordid material. Actually, Requiem also boasts of Aronofsky’s visionary and kaleidoscopic storytelling technique, so I think that’s an important point.
Technique.

Not that technique is totally absent from Open Water, but other than a stand-out sequence as we near midnight (the couple having been drifting for over half a day), most of the film is presented to us in a pretty straight-forward manner, contributing greatly to its documentary feel. Now, some may argue that without fancy camera movements and angles and MTV-editing, we are not distracted from the story. My problem here is this is not so much a story as it is a situation.
At the risk of generalizing, a film can either entertain, or it can actually say something; sometimes, a film can do both. Now, though what is “entertainment” is largely a subjective thing (I may think South Park is entertaining—and I may think it says something too—but to others, it may just be crass and offensive; in the same way, what others may find entertaining could be, for me, some Hollywood feel-good claptrap) but watching the discomfort and agony of two people is certainly not entertainment in my books.
And since the majority of the film is just us watching the poor couple suffer, we are even left with an unwelcome sense of having been a perverse and sadistic voyeur to the proceedings. The fact that the film is based on a real-life incident makes the viewing experience even less savoury: two people really were abandoned out in the middle of nowhere.
Open Water doesn’t seem to say anything either (except perhaps that bad things happen for no good reason). So if it doesn’t entertain, and it doesn’t really say anything significant or profound, then what is it there for? All it really seems to do is document an unfortunate couple’s suffering without leaving any signposts to tell us how this could have all been avoided.

Now, the film has been glibly described by some as “Jaws meets The Blair Witch Project,” which is really doing a disservice to Jaws, still one of Spielberg’s best, after all these years. Open Water though, does resemble Project (but it is a better film, if that’s any consolation). Both are low-budget films that really don’t have a story per se, but just throw individuals—and the audience—into an uncomfortable, tension-filled situation, and let the cards fall where they may.
And though I do believe horror is the great democratic leveler of all, and is there to jostle us and wake us up from complacency, I also want a story as the foundation and framework upon which that horror will be draped, not some situation. (Also one of the big problems I had with The Blair Witch Project.)
In the end though, if you intend to watch Open Water, prepare yourself for an unpleasant experience. And don’t expect any kind of comfort or even sense to the proceedings. This is a document of suffering, plain and simple.

(Open Water OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “Terror on the High Seas, Agony at the Multiplex.”)