From Representative Gentleness to Narrative Harshness Places, Times and Forms of Impudence in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games

Résumé

We generally consider Funny Games as an embarrassing and violent film, at times, horrible, downright unbearable. Despite everything, it’s a filmic experience to try, or rather to undergo. A rough affective experience that defiles us. It corrupts us, makes us accomplices in the psychological torture and the methodical assassination of a bourgeois family. No explanation is given for all this hostility, no motivation mitigates these despicable acts, no justification, the violence is expressed brutally and the spectator, powerless and unable to escape it, will have to undergo it. We will see that the director Michael Haneke is neither in pure artistic audacity nor in the ease of “unworthy solicitation”, as some journalists have been able to write… We will see that the keys to understand this film, which lasts 1 hour and 44 minutes, are already hiding in its first 3 minutes. Through this article, our ambition is to put the concept of impudence back at the center of this film which is described a little bit too quickly as ultraviolent, obscene and sadistic