The Best Stylist Around (6.1)

Two intruders break a man’s leg with a golf club. But we, the audience, don’t see this. We see a Jackson Pollock splatter of blood land on the television screen behind them as they are just out of frame. What we do see is the aftermath. We see, Georg, the man, trying to crawl, to walk, to drag himself on his broken leg to the phone at the end of hall. And now the camera offers us no escape; there are no edits or pans to the background, only a steady, prolonged shot of a man trying to stand on a broken leg. This isn’t the cathartic Hollywood blockbuster approach to violence or the hyper-stylized approach of Hong Kong martial arts flicks. Or even the buckets of gore approach of the modern horror film. This is cruel and measured. This is an approach without the relief of moral certainty or the courtesy to spare the audience the bleak, drawn out consequences. This is Funny Games, a film by Michael Haneke, the best violence stylist of modern cinema.

American films are steeped in violence; from the wacky whacking of cartoons to the adrenaline pumped action stunts of box office hits. But all these different manifestations share the same myopic timeline: audiences get the electrifying violence and none of its devastating, depressing consequences. You have undoubtedly seen a limb break in a film but until you see Georg limp towards the phone for what seems to be eternity, you haven’t understood what it means. And this is the genius of Haneke: his ability to engineer violence that offers no joy, no consummation, only pain, reality, repercussions, and misery. And this control and austerity fills his films with a hard moral dignity. They are very serious, cold, unmistakably German works. They are severely beautiful.