Casting viewers as accomplices

Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," which opens Friday, is a painstakingly exacting remake of his own 1997 film of the same title. The story begins when a pair of young men, dressed in immaculate tennis whites, arrives at the summer cottage of a pleasantly bourgeois couple, who are on holiday with their young son. After a seemingly innocuous misunderstanding -- something about borrowing eggs -- the boys take the family captive, subjecting them to brutal psychological humiliations and severe physical torments.

One of the world's most respected filmmakers, Haneke, who turns 66 this month, is a winner of multiple prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and a subject of a recent retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. So there is something disconcertingly downmarket about such an upscale filmmaker doing an English-language remake of his own work. Yet in Haneke's world things are rarely as they seem.

Despite Haneke's use of formal devices of increasing audacity to break down the fourth wall and repeatedly remind audiences that they are only watching a film, "Funny Games" can feel at times like a dirty trick being played on viewers. The original sharply divided critics, many of whom could not stomach the cruel dispassion with which Haneke portrayed the sordid goings-on.

Which is precisely as it should be, according to Haneke. As in many of his previous films ("Benny's Video," "The Piano Teacher" and "Cache"), Haneke wants audiences to think hard about what they are watching rather than passively accepting the ideological implications of what flows from the screen.

"The film was always intended for an English-language audience because the subject matter -- the consumption of violence -- is most prevalent in English-language filmmaking," Haneke said via translator recently on the phone from Austria when asked why he chose to revisit his prior work. "Because the [original] film was in German it just didn't reach the audience for which it was intended."

The new iteration came about when producer Chris Coen approached Haneke for the remake rights to "Funny Games," and the director said he would prefer to do it himself. Having worked with such European stars as Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert, Haneke insisted on casting Naomi Watts -- he said he would likely have not made the new film if she had said no -- rounding out the family with Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart and casting Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as their captors.