Funny Games, USA, 2008

Director Michael Haneke Screenplay Michael Haneke Producer Chris Coen, Hamish McAlpine Director of Photography Darius Khondji Art Director Hinju Kim Costumes David C. Robinson With Naomi Watts (Ann), Tim Roth (George), Michael Pitt (Paul), Brady Corbet (Peter), and Devon Gearhart (Georgie)

Runtime 107 minutes

DVD: USA, 2008 Produced and Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures (Region 1) Aspect Ration 1.85:1 Sound Mix DTS, Dolby Digital, SDDS

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke directs this shot-by-shot remake of his own 1997 foreign-language film of the same name. Then as now, Haneke is commenting on the American entertainment culture that thrives on violence, especially on killing.

In the decade since Haneke first directed Funny Games (1997), if anything, his commentaries have only been proven correct. Just in the past five years, the cinema landscape has been bombarded with movies that keep upping the ante in terms of murder, brutality, and torture.

In this horror film about a wealthy family of three, a man named George, his wife Ann and their son Georgie, who are taken hostage after their home is invaded by two college-aged serial killers, one of the victims asks, 'Why don't you just kill us?' Peter, the least intelligent and more sensitive of the two killers answers, 'You mustn't forget the importance of entertainment.'

In another scene, Paul, the leader and most talkative of the two killers asks, 'Do you think this is enough?' This angel-face demon, played perfectly by Michael Pitt, looks at the camera and asks the question again. In this way, Haneke is also asking the audience the same thing.

Is this enough? How many movies do we need of people being mass murdered, tortured, or seve>^xli the melodrama informs us that one must put away old things and repudiate the self-indulgent life s/he has been leading in order to become a responsible adult.^xlii It appeals to men by providing them with ‘a vicaroius, hysterical, experience of femininity which can be more definitively laid to rest for having been “worked through” ’; and it appeals to women because of ‘its tendency to feminise the man, to complicate and destabilise his identity’.^xliii

Moledski’s theorisation of narrative and time in melodrama, and its applicability to Crying Out Love further explains the film’s appeal to both men and women – the male spectators take this as a golden opportunity to indulge in a sad love story, and the female spectators are glad to see that men do cry. There is, moreover, a strong motif of return than is the ordinary melodrama. That Saku finally gets over his ‘pure love’ and pursue a ‘real love’ relationship has been noted, but in the light of the magic performances, the film’s ending is much more ambiguous than it first meets the eye. Uluru, where the native people of Australia have buried the bodies of their ancestors twice so that both their flesh and their bones are absorbed into the ground, serves as an archetypal image that creates a feeling of permanence. Does this mean that Aki will remain in Saku’s memory forever, though he will be married to Ritsuko and love Ritsuko as a flesh-and-blood person? Or is he more like Ritsuko’s father, who has remained single after his wife (who was hospitalised during the same period as Aki) died—a fact that is revealed in a seemingly unimportant phone conversation Ritsuko has with him at the beginning of the film?

The real magic show, followed by the red umbrella in the air, turns Ritsuko into a filmic double of Aki, a doubling process initiated by the dying girl and completed when Ritsuko reunites with Saku at the airport and tells her, ‘That day, Aki was there, and she only made it that far. Let’s tie up loose ends.’ This doubling effect both contradicts and complements the magic ritual and the ‘letting-go’ gesture within it—though Saku should ‘live his life’, he will do so by marrying Ritsuko, who is strongly associated with his past. It seems as if the magic of the show lies less in the ‘letting-go’ than in the magical strengthening of the bond between Aki and Ritsuko, who have otherwise enjoyed only a casual friendship.

In the light of the above, the sense of return, therefore, is stronger and more ominous than Modleski has described: it encourages ‘living one’s life’, but at the same time is about fidelity—the importance of remaining loyal to one’s love partner even after she is long gone. This message weighs heavily on the audience, especially since Aki is a more impressive and memorable character than Ritsuko. The heaviness of such a message, above all, owes to the implication of destiny: as Aki asks Ritsuko to deliver the tape and even causes a delay by her magic show, she arguably brings about Ritsuko’s accident; it looks as if Aki is ‘destined’ to create a double of herself in Ritsuko and Saku is ‘destined’ to marry this double. Quite ironically, though, pursuing a new life with Ritsuko offers a consolation to the male protagonist and the audience, who feel victimised and helpless by the feeling of ‘too late’: the demand by the sympathetic tears are partially satisfied, and in an intriguing way.

Crying, Magic, and the Ritual Approach

The crying scenes and magic shows remind the reader of the genre theory, which can be used to explain the rise of genures, hence the popularity of jun’ai films such as this. Thomas Schatz (1981) believes that genres should be seen as a ‘collective cultural expression’,^xliv hence ‘vehicles of and for the exploration of ideas, ideals, cultural values and ideologial dilemmas’ central to society.^xlv Schatz’s conception (1986) was partly derived from the anthropological theory of Claude Levi-Strauss, seeing genres as ritualised dramas resembling holiday celebrations which reaffirm cultural values while making the audience forget the more disturbing aspects of the world.^xlvi John Cawelti (1976) observes that when the group’s attitudes change, new formulae arise and existing formulas develop new themes and symbols; these stories, produced and distributed almost entirely in terms of commercial exploitation, both affirm existing interests and attitudes, and resolve tensions arising from the conflicting interests of different groups within a culture and/ or from ambiguous attitudes toward certain values.^xlvii

Crying Out Love can be deemed as one of those commercial enterprises that exploits the audiences’ yearning for pure love and fulfil their ideals and fantansies; in particular, as Crying Out Love centres on the male protagonist’s deceased first lover, it resolves the tension and difficulty in seeking and preserving such ‘pure’ relationships in real life. Whereas the ritual approach originally draws an analogy between performing rituals and going to movies, it is interesting that this particular film is made up of further rituals that both satisfy audiences’ desires and reinforce their values.

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