One of the must disturbing, and poignant, scenes in the film is when Erika sneaks off to the bathroom to cut herself with a razor. It is presented as matter-of-factly as Georges's drawing the curtains in Caché. She takes the blade from its hiding place, sits on the lip of the bathtub, spreads her legs, reaches down, and the blood slides down the side of tub. As she reaches to do it again, Erika's mother calls her to dinner. Erika quickly tries to clean herself and erase all evidence of what she's done. "Dinner! Dinner!" the mother calls. What's striking is how routine the act feels: that is, how routinely hidden. By making this self-mutilation so horribly everyday, Haneke ensures its obscenity. Unlike the classic Hollywood "reveal"--Orson Welles's "rosebud" being the most iconic example--Erika's secret is not a once-in-a-lifetime exposure, but a daily surfacing that must be pushed down. "Coming!" she tells her mother.
Haneke's latest, Funny Games, a shot-for-shot redo of his unbearably remorseless and violent 1997 Austrian film, is the filmmaker at his most Dostoevskian: Here, he really does force you to watch the beheading, and for that reason alone, it's an early frontrunner for most Reviled Haneke Film Ever (which, given that he has been booed at Cannes, is saying something). It is a brutal, manipulative film. It seems bent on humiliating its audience. A woman at the screening I went to left the theater repeating, "What a passive-aggressive asshole!" to all of us in the elevator. Many nodded in response. From the reviews, this seems a common reaction. Anyone naïve enough to like the movie, Haneke has needled thusly: "Those who watch the film to the end apparently needed it. Those who leave earlier apparently didn't."
I think there is much value in Funny Games--it is the most convincing simulation of a violent experience I've ever been subjected to--but the above provocation from Haneke reveals why it lacks the maturity and insidiousness of Caché or The Piano Teacher. The failure to stomach an actual beheading is not, after all, a moral failure; it is a digestive one. No one needs to witness a brutal execution to understand the injustices of capital punishment, just as no one needs to watch Funny Games to question the media's representations of violence. Haneke is too smart not to know this. It is simply that he is more invested in--and inspired by--how we turn away than what it is we turn away from (which is why Funny Games feels like a kind of enlarged footnote to Caché and The Piano Teacher). This not a knock at all. The truth is, despite his hot-button topics and extracurricular comments, Haneke is not really a political filmmaker. He is far more interested in reflecting the world than changing it.